Our approach is that you have to ask what the options are for countries such as these. These are countries that are really backed against a wall. Sometimes people talk of them as being potentially failed states. Sometimes you hear talk of their potentially being narco-states.
The only option, from my perspective, is to help create functioning justice systems based on the rule of law. There's no other option. The only other options are a military solution or failure. Those are the three options.
What we need to do is work hand in glove with them. What I have found in our work is that people tend to look at the big cases, and they become the representative cases. Most of the people being killed are the people on the buses and on the street. The majority of people, or many of them, are being killed by gang members.
We have to get them to start addressing these problems and starting to deliver for their people. In my experience, there are many who have committed to that. They want their country to be stable. They are very educated. They're very committed. I compare Canada's situation with theirs and ask what we would be like, if we had 45 times the violence and had probably a quarter of the resources.
The last problem is that we have legal procedures that are actually more complicated in that region than those we have in our own country, because of this hybrid. What we're trying to do is address that and say, you have to start....
The other issue, which is an important one, is the culture issue. When we were dealing with Guatemala.... If you're a prosecutor and you're dealing with only a 2% conviction rate, how much belief do you have that you can do something? In our own country, our prosecutors and our police actually think that they can produce. They know that they can deliver. The issue isn't just skills building and systems building. There's a whole cultural issue that deals with the empowerment of the justice players to take on.... And of course, they're doing it in an environment in which they suffer threats. I worked with enormously committed people who work enormous hours. It inspires one to say, “We...”.
We're seeing it. In the case of Guatemala it has taken us 10 years, but we're starting to see the fruits of our labour. I think it's growing exponentially there now. In Honduras our work, systematically, is only three years old. It's going to take some time. I'm hoping Canada will continue to be there.