One of the Coordinadora's four program areas is the Culture of Peace. The Coordinadora is working to build this program through CIPAZ, the Peace Initiative Committee: a group of seven community members working to manage, prevent, and transform conflicts in the Local Zone of Peace. I am a member of CIPAZ. Our work involves both direct action and providing training to community leaders. Mario Mejía, a professional with extensive experience in human rights, serves as program coordinator.

Estela Hernandez plays a key role in the Coordinadora's efforts to build the Local Zone of Peace in the Bajo Lempa region. She serves on the board of the Mangrove Association and in CIPAZ.

One important component of our work is understanding that we do not seek to eliminate conflicts. They are an element of daily life that we cannot avoid. However, we do seek to take care of them at an early stage and prevent them whenever possible.

A good deal of CIPAZ's work takes place with and through the Local Groups. Local Groups are regional subdivisions of the Coordinadora's structure, with each representing 3 or more neighboring communities. We have held more than 30 workshops with the Local Groups, providing training in conflict mediation, transformation, and prevention to the community leaders who participate in them.

This year, we came to understand that we shouldn't just focus our energies on training community leaders. Those people already have many responsibilities and besides, we don't want to put all of our eggs in one basket.

The community leaders themselves have urged us to make the skills available to many people in the community. So lately, we've been holding workshops with civil society organizations in the communities, such as women's and youth groups. These Dialog and Reflection Circles, workshops at the very local level, are open to the public and have even attracted the participation of people from neighboring communities that are not associated with the Coordinadora.

Community members were hesitant at first about the Dialog and Reflection Circles. They feared that they would be just another meeting where people sit around and talk without getting anything done. In order to make it clear that this activity was different, we changed the name slightly, to Dialog and Reflection Circles For Action.

Through our interaction with the Local Groups and community leaders, we've come to work with a sector of society that hadn't received much attention before. Youths in El Salvador today are fundamentally different from youths in the past. It used to be that parents and kids had the same problems, issues, etc. and could relate on that level. That isn't the case any more. So, youths on the one hand feel excluded from adult activities and adults feel that they cannot relate to the adults. One of the Local Groups recognized this and they asked CIPAZ for help, and to have a Dialog Circle specifically for youths, which we did.

Rigoberto and Yanira, two members of CIPAZ, have really taken the initiative to work with youth. This is seen particularly as a conflict prevention measure: finding constructive activities for youths so they will stay out of trouble and not get involved in gangs. One of the healthy youth activities that they're working on is the community radio station in Ciudad Romero. Hopefully it will be transmitting in a few months.

Through the training that CIPAZ members are receiving from Mark Chupp (a US-based Mennonite Conflict Mediation specialist) and Yek Ineme (an NGO based in El Salvador), we are gaining a new appreciation for what conflicts are and how we should face them. We are moving beyond the model of conflict management and towards a model of conflict transformation.

Under the mediation model, the mediator (be it a CIPAZ member or someone else in the community) almost takes on the role of a judge, or can at least be perceived that way. CIPAZ does not want to promote a model that tends to create winners and losers (we want just winners, whenever possible), and is working to make people understand that the mediation that CIPAZ promotes is different from the legal model that they have seen before.

Conflict Transformation as a goal is fundamentally different from mediation in that it addresses not only the conflict at hand. It continues to address the relationship between the involved parties: repairing the relationship so that the involved parties do not remain estranged or predisposed to escalate future conflicts that may arise. This technique is proving very important as a supplement to the mediation skills that CIPAZ has already learned.

We're already seeing some changes in community members. They have long been in the habit of seeking out someone else to help them deal with their problems. Now they are beginning to see themselves as instruments of change.

From a presentation made by Estela Hernández on September 29th, 2001. This document synthesized from notes taken by Harold Baron and Sean Hale.