Masculinities, Violence and Multiculturalism in Latin America

Male violence has occupied a foundational place in Latin American history. Latin America’s past has been marked by men’s violent acts, such as the Spanish Conquest and Colonization in which not only colonized "women" were powerless within their communities, but also colonized "men" were subordinately placed within a hierarchy of masculinities. This societal structure was based on mechanisms of racial inferiority and gender subordination, which established relationships of opposition and of complicity between the people and their colonizers. The postcolonialist period manifested the consequences of such brutality and its difficult to speak about Latin-American social history where violence hasn’t been present, not as a Latin-American cultural trait but as a social fact.

While I’ll reference the Latin-American context generally, I’ll particularly focus on the situation in Colombia, an area on which I have extensively worked. Due to the old and painful reality of the Colombian armed conflict, exceeded only by the Israeli-Palestinian and Indian-Pakistani conflicts, the need has become apparent to promote initiatives, which introduce discussion and action into the public and academic agenda on the two following issues: first, the conflict continues to differentially affect the lives of Colombian women and men because of their social place in the gender order; and second, the difficulty of dissociating the violence of masculinity, as it has been designed and constructed socially in the Colombian context.

This paper will first reflect on the relevance of social intervention programs developed with men oriented towards violence prevention. It will then address male resistance to change and the attempt to trivialize violence against women and reaffirm masculinity based on domination, in which some geopolitical and internal social hierarchical considerations are present. Finally, this paper will discuss the forceful effects that multiculturalism in the region may or may not have on gender violence and its eradication.