National Dialogue for Peace in Mexico: for a shared and habitable future

ABSTRACT

Mexico is facing a profound crisis of violence, disappearance, impunity, and social fragmentation. One of its most painful expressions is the recruitment of children, adolescents, and young people by organized crime. This phenomenon is not simply the result of individual decisions. It is shaped by a combination of individual, family, community, structural, and cultural conditions—including violence at home, school dropout, lack of opportunities, poverty, displacement, institutional weakness, and the normalization of violence. Recent research and reports continue to document how organized crime uses both coercion and deception to recruit increasingly younger people.

The National Dialogue for Peace (DNP) approaches this challenge from a territorial and systemic perspective. Rather than focusing exclusively on organized crime or on the moment of recruitment, it asks how society can create conditions in which young people can imagine and build a different future. Its guiding principle is: “Making territories habitable and futures possible.”

This means strengthening families and communities, creating meaningful opportunities for young people, recovering safe public spaces, accompanying victims, addressing violence and mental health, and rebuilding trust and social fabric. It also means recognizing that once young people have been recruited, they should not simply be seen as perpetrators, but also as people whose lives have been affected by violence and coercion. UNICEF has similarly emphasized the need to change perceptions of recruited children and promote their reintegration into society.

For the DNP, however, prevention cannot be sustained by isolated actors. Government has essential responsibilities, but civil society, communities, families, schools, businesses, churches, universities, and young people themselves also have roles to play.

The central challenge is therefore not only how to prevent recruitment, but how to build a broad social “we” capable of sustaining hope, protecting young people, and transforming the conditions that make violence possible. This requires long-term, territorial, coordinated action—and the conviction that no person should be given up on.