Dialogue as a Faith Response to Social Violence in El Salvador: A Pastoral-Theological Analysis of the Response of IPAZ to Gang Violence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Extreme social violence destabilizing El Salvador has been attributed pri-marily to youth gangs since the 1990s. While most responses—government, media and the general public—have been punitive and retributive, IPAZ (Ecumenical Pastoral Initiative for Life and Peace) was formed by a diverse group of religious leaders to promote dialogue as a more effective, faith-based response to such violence. IPAZ was inaugurated in November, 2012, in response to a gang truce on 9 March of that year. The general response to such dialogue has been mostly negative, to the point of practically criminalizing dialogue with gang mem-bers, who were classified as terrorists in August, 2015. Dialogue promoted by IPAZ is suspect in this regard. This research project, conducted with IPAZ members, draws on their expe-riences with respect to violence and dialogue. It also includes a cursory sur- vey of experiences of other historical and global dialogues, especially in the field of theology. In Latin America, including El Salvador, liberation theol-ogy has been central to such analysis and response. Dialogue is a critical component, as those involved hear each other's life-stories, wisdom and ide-as, learn from one another and implement the outcome. While dialogue with gangs could lead to a rational setting aside of violence, building a society of peace and security, structural violence must also be addressed. There is occasional reference to such breadth and depth of peace-making in IPAZ meetings. Inequality, exploitation and exclusion, suffered especially economically in a society such as El Salvador, are factors provok-ing much of the social violence. Much of this is the result of the corruption of politicians and the tax evasion of businesses. Only when corruption and impunity are overcome will there be peace with justice and equality. IPAZ has responded to the Gospel mandate to promote dialogue in three areas: between IPAZ and the gangs; between IPAZ and the government; and among rival gang factions. The research question is: "Is dialogue an effective faith response for ad-dressing social violence in Salvadoran society?”
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".