City of God

Happy New Year to all!

So how did you ring in the new year?

My folks and I decided to celebrate New Year's Eve in the traditional New York fashion: we went to an Italian restaurant for dinner and then home to watch a DVD.

(What? You thought maybe I meant that we joined the mass of humanity crammed into Times Square? No, no, no... A true New Yorker does that maybe once or twice in their lifetime, usually when friends are visiting from out-of-state. There are many better ways to spend the night than by standing on asphalt for seven hours in sub-freezing temperatures, crushed by a mob of complete strangers, while waiting for a ball to drop down a pole. We prefer to see that on tv, like everyone else.)

The movie we watched, I have to confess, wasn't your normal holiday fare. But it was moving, heartbreaking, inspiring, shocking and oddly appropriate.

"City of God" is an amazing Brazilian film that portrays the reality of youth gangs and the drug trade in the "favelas", or slum areas, that surround Rio de Janeiro. I can't recommend this film highly enough... as entertainment, as art, and as an eye-opening glance into the real-world problems that plague the sprawling cities of Latin America.

In fact, the reason why I said the film was "oddly appropriate" is because at the very moment we were watching the movie, the New York Times was publishing the following story about Guatemala on it's website:

Guatemala Bleeds in Vise of Gangs and Vengeance
By Ginger Thompson

Nearly a decade after the end of a civil war that left 200,000 people dead or missing in this country of 14 million people, a new wave of violence has hit Guatemala and it looks a lot like the old one - some say worse. Guatemalan authorities said an estimated 4,325 people were killed in the first 10 months of 2005. That is one of the highest per capita murder rates in Latin America, and far more than the average annual killings in the last decade of this country's armed conflict.

Even in peace, governments across Central America have said violence remains the principal threat to stability. Here, as in neighboring Honduras and El Salvador, the violence comes with many of the trademarks of the cold war: rape, torture and extrajudicial kidnappings and killings. And now, as they did then, human rights investigators have raised concerns about a clandestine "social cleansing campaign," led by rogue police officers and vigilante mobs.

This latest cycle of violence began five years ago, when street gangs with roots in Los Angeles - especially the Mara 18 and the Mara Salvatruchas, known as MS-13 - began to spread across Central America and southern Mexico...

Read the entire article

Each January I burn a bunch of brain cells compiling a list of resolutions to help guide my life and work in the new year. I haven't had time to work on this year's list yet (resolution #1: make time to make resolutions) but after watching "City of God" and reading the above article, one thing is clear: the challenges confronting those of us who struggle for peace and justice in the world are enormous.

Are you ready to resist in 2006?

Tags: Guatemala, City of God, New York, Gangs, Justice