{"id":6730,"date":"2026-05-11T07:52:41","date_gmt":"2026-05-11T13:52:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/juventudes.mx\/?post_type=jovenes-en-el-mundo&p=6730"},"modified":"2026-05-11T08:06:25","modified_gmt":"2026-05-11T14:06:25","slug":"violencia-armada-la-barrera-invisible-a-los-ojos-de-quienes-generan-las-oportunidades","status":"publish","type":"jovenes-en-el-mundo","link":"https:\/\/juventudes.mx\/en\/jovenes-en-el-mundo\/violencia-armada-la-barrera-invisible-a-los-ojos-de-quienes-generan-las-oportunidades\/","title":{"rendered":"Armed violence: The invisible barrier to those who create opportunities"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Bryan Martinez<\/strong>
Political scientist and young advisor at GOYN Barranquilla<\/strong><\/p>\n

What would you think if you were told that, depending on where you're born, you might face more challenges in escaping poverty? Well, recent studies have explored how geography can give us clues about how difficult it is for young people to find opportunities, as the American economist explains. Raj Chetty (2016), who says: \u201cWhere children grow up matters enormously to their chances of escaping poverty\u201d<\/strong>But when we focus on our Latin America, one of the several regions of the global south that, with so many barriers, there is a topic that few dare to talk about, and it is because of the very danger that it involves studying, debating and counteracting it so that the young people in Colombia, Brazil or Mexico suffer day by day, such as urban violence and organized crime.<\/p>\n

But, to begin discussing this barrier, we must explain what it consists of and how our region, unlike others in the Global South, faces a greater disadvantage in fighting poverty and inequality among young Latinos.<\/strong>For this we refer to drug trafficking, which, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, is the trafficking, production, distribution and all illegal activities related to narcotics, which for many decades has led to the proliferation of illegal economies, the creation of criminal gangs and, worst of all, The recruitment of young people who build life trajectories marked by illegality and fear, fear derived from being persecuted by a State that could not protect them and bring them closer to an opportunity, and from organized crime that gives them money in exchange for a slavery full of dangers and precarious jobs<\/strong>But it is here where a barrier that generates mental health, educational and dignity problems for young people is the greatest suffering in our cities today.<\/p>\n

In countries like Colombia, according to official data, In 2024 alone, approximately one minor was recruited every 20 hours in Colombia.<\/strong>According to organizations and reports cited on the situation, as reported in the newspaper El Pa\u00eds; but beyond the recruitment of young people, we see phenomena of mass disappearances as occur in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and peripheral cities or in northern Mexico, as denounced by Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International, and we should also remember the "Containment" operation of October 28, 2025, which we will not discuss in debates about how successful a security policy is or not, but how the clashes, whether between armed groups in Colombia, Mexican cartels, or Brazilian criminal organizations, are one of the main "black holes" of young people we lose when we fail to give them opportunities<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

But it is at this point, when reviewing the panorama of just 3 countries, that we must question ourselves as actors in an ecosystem that seeks to connect opportunities (social and community-based organizations, institutions, companies and the states of Latin American nations), whether if we generate dignified conditions of peace and security for young people we can reduce the gaps in education, employment and entrepreneurship that we all want for ourselves young people. Because every social problem is interdependent on many factors, such as crime, and it's not enough to simply provide employment if young people don't feel safe leaving their neighborhood or home for fear of gang violence, drugs, or disappearing due to actors who sell a false sense of security by stigmatizing every young person with potential who simply needs an opportunity.<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

If we focus on more specific contexts of how violence keeps young people away from opportunities, we find Barranquilla, where in the GOYN youth report Barranquilla and Our Barranquilla in 2025 It tells us that violence and extortion, along with the lack of digital connectivity, are difficulties that 99.21% of entrepreneurs face in the sustainability of their businesses.<\/strong>But if we talk not only about entrepreneurship, in Barranquilla, reports from the citizen security observatory of the Universidad del Norte found that by 2024, young people were one of the biggest victims of crime. This not only brings insecurity but also problems with socio-emotional well-being: a young person without a dignified life cannot work with dignity, which is not a made-up fact; it's a statistic that the WHO itself (2024) tells us, stating: "to prevent youth violence, an integrated approach is needed that recognizes the strong correlation between rates of youth violence and economic inequalities." As a leader and a young person in constant contact with other young people from different backgrounds, it's common to see how many, in order to go to school, are demotivated by pressure from their environment, where friends or family members may be part of a criminal system and normalize a constant danger that often prevents them from leaving their neighborhood to work or study. This could be in Barranquilla, a favela in Rio de Janeiro, or a neighborhood on the outskirts of Mexico City. It is here that public institutions must focus on the problem of insecurity, aiming to save young people from falling prey to recruitment, excessive drug use, and the bullets that rain down on their streets every day from confrontations, whether due to between criminal groups or the public force itself.<\/p>\n

But to achieve this, the first thing we must do is put young people and the insecurity they experience at the center of the discussion. The formula that is always talked about is that more opportunities will reduce insecurity, but nobody talks about the fact that even if you bring opportunities, armed and criminal violence will still generate barriers to transportation, socio-emotional health, and economics in the territory, coincidentally (or not) in the peripheries, and it is here, as Francisco Thoumi says, that the path is first to strengthen public institutions in the territories.<\/strong>But this is also where I would invite companies to participate in the development of the territories where they have an impact, all this to generate trust and legitimacy, wherever the opportunities come from, because it is not fair that the main employer is crime and not business, universities, and the State.<\/p>\n

In conclusion, geography remains a determining factor for young people to escape vulnerability and poverty, but in Latin America, violence and organized crime are a greater addiction. If we young people don't sit down and demand the right to a healthy environment where we can walk safely in our streets, we must demand a voice in public security decisions and demand peace in our streets, because work without peace is not a dignified life.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":115,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"imagen_principal_b":"http:\/\/juventudes.mx\/wp-content\/uploads\/jet-engine-forms\/27\/2026\/05\/FOTO-ARTICULO-BRYAN.jpeg"},"categories":[39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6730","jovenes-en-el-mundo","type-jovenes-en-el-mundo","status-publish","hentry","category-violencia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/juventudes.mx\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/jovenes-en-el-mundo\/6730","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/juventudes.mx\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/jovenes-en-el-mundo"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/juventudes.mx\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/jovenes-en-el-mundo"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juventudes.mx\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/juventudes.mx\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juventudes.mx\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juventudes.mx\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}