A Plague of Hopelessness

Most people know Belize as simply one stop on a Caribbean cruise ship’s route. The beauty of the country can mask the terrible gang violence its people suffer, especially in Belize City. As a Jesuit serving as a chaplain at the juvenile detention center here, I accompany many young men who have only ever known gang life and its horrors.

On a recent visit, for example, one of the young men told me about the first time someone close to him was shot. He was thirteen at the time, and his best friend, who was twelve, had just finished playing basketball at a nearby playground. His friend was standing with a group of older people when someone rolled up on them on a motorcycle and opened fire. His friend was shot through the back of the head. “If you’d held his head up to the sun, light would have shown through the hole,” he told me. “That turned me into a monster.” 

He may think he’s a monster, but I don’t believe that. As a Catholic, I want to impress on him and all the young men at the Wagner Youth Facility (WYF) that they are the “Imago Dei,” made in the likeness and image of God according to the Book of Genesis. We can’t use that kind of language with the young men detained here, of course — that kind of “churchy” language falls flat. So I try various ways to get that message across. And it constantly runs into the cold reality of their experiences. 

For instance, when a Jesuit companion and I were giving a workshop on this theme, we invited the youths to draw something good from the environment they grew up in, like something from their neighborhood. Several young men who were from the same neighborhood in Belize City’s southside looked at each other and laughed. “Brother, there’s nothing good where we grew up. The only good thing we do is drink and smoke.” Others nodded in agreement. I paused for a few moments, then suggested that what they were doing was not for fun, but to numb themselves. 

That’s not a judgment on them. Self-numbing is a natural response to the sorts of things these young men have played witness to their whole lives: corpses in the streets, threats around every corner, violence committed against family members and friends. 

In the face of so much suffering, and with no prospect of breaking the cycle of poverty they were born into, it’s easy for these young men to feel a profound sense of hopelessness about their lives. Greg Boyle, the Los Angeles-based Jesuit who founded Homeboy Ministries, the world’s largest gang rehabilitation and re-entry program in the world, says that despair is the real reason people join gangs in the first place.

“Every kid who joins a gang knows it will lead to death or prison,” he writes. “They just don’t care that it will. No hopeful kid has ever joined a gang … Hopeful kids don’t join gangs. Gang involvement is about a lethal absence of hope.”

In this absence of hope, the young men I work with turn to what they know: gangs, guns, drugs, money, violence. More than 300 gang-involved individuals interviewed for a 2017 assessment of community gang violence in Belize confirmed that fact. According to the report, sponsored by the Inter-American Development Bank, the top three reasons these people gave for joining a gang were: to feel safe, to make money, and to get revenge for the injury or death of a loved one.

The situation has only worsened since that study and it is drawing wider notice. The online publication Vice News ran a video story on how a combination of United States pop culture and immigration deportations effectively exported the notorious Blood and Crip gangs of Los Angeles to Belize. Vice News opened that video segment by mentioning the death of a young man whose killing sparked the most recent bout of tit-for-tat gang violence. His name was Gerald Tillet. He was at WYF for a couple months earlier this year and he was released around Easter. Three weeks later, he was shot dead in the middle of a street in the southside of Belize City. His best friends are still at WYF, as are the young men charged with shooting him.

One of the most surprising things I’ve experienced is how these young men behave after the death of someone they love. Gerald’s friends initially cried when they found out he had been killed. But they quickly accepted that this is just how life is on the streets. Another young man lost his older brother to gun violence. That brother was also at WYF earlier this year. The next day I asked him how he was handling that loss. He replied: “I’m good.” 

Still, for a brief moment before the veil of fatalism fell across his features, tears welled up in his eyes at the memory of his brother. My experiences at the detention center have challenged me at every turn and forced me to consider how I might talk about hope in the face of hopelessness. Many of these young men seem to have accepted the brutality of their lives. “It’s just the way it is.” Yet the tears that came to that young man’s eyes showed me that all is not lost, and it reminded me that they truly are the Imago Dei. Their tears are proof. As Pope Francis has said, “God weeps for humanity,” and in God’s tears, and ours, we meet as one, in hope.