They lure children as young as 9 with threats or promises of money and protection. Beginning as lookouts or drug packagers, kids soon graduate to more dangerous jobs and by the time they turn 16 are often immersed in drug running, extortion and even murder.
Knowing minors will pull milder sentences if caught, jefes (gang leaders or bosses) use them for jobs where the risk of being busted is highest. With a virtually unlimited recruitment pool, they see these kids as expendable—they can continue their criminal “education” in juvenile hall and will be back on the streets in a few years anyway.
But Rosalba Cordero aims to change all that. President of the nonprofit Asociación Desarrollo Social y Recuperación de Valores (Social Development and Recovery of Values Association), she is determined to end the vicious cycle of drugs and crime gripping Mexico. With her husband, Jose Maria Cordero, the association’s executive director, their organization’s work runs the gamut from protecting the nation’s children to salvaging Mexico’s prison population from recidivism.
“My mission is to teach values and help people have a better life,” she says. She does this with the common-sense values laid out in The Way to Happiness by L. Ron Hubbard. The book’s 21 precepts not only provide youth with a moral compass they can use to steer through life’s challenges, they also have the power to break down the granite defenses of hardened lifelong criminals to restore their dignity and self-respect.
Cordero began her campaign in the schools of Mexico City’s most forsaken neighborhoods. Word spread of the dramatic changes in young people completing her workshop, and she was invited to bring the program to juvenile detention centers.
“You could see them start to realize the impact of the crime they committed and begin for the first time to take responsibility for what they had done.”
Prisons were next. Cordero’s introduction to delivering workshops in a maximum-security prison came with a chilling warning at the security gate: once anyone passed this point, if a riot or any violence erupted, the prison would go into lockdown—with everyone—including any visitors—remaining inside.
“I felt my mouth dry, and I was shaking,” Cordero said, but she overcame her nerves and went on to guide some of the country’s most notorious offenders through the precepts of The Way to Happiness within the prison walls. She had prisoners examine their own lives to identify times when they applied the precepts and times they violated them.
The results were remarkable.
“You could see them start to realize the impact of the crime they committed and begin for the first time to take responsibility for what they had done,” Cordero says. “They see the point when they first lost faith in themselves, and that’s when the rehabilitation really begins.”
“This shows us that we can go forward,” said one inmate at a workshop. “We can be different, we can have a different way of life. Just because we are here, it doesn’t mean we have to stay this way.”
As L. Ron Hubbard wrote in the epilogue of The Way to Happiness: “One can feel that things are such now that it is much too late to do anything, that one’s past road is so messed up that there is no chance of drawing a future one that will be any different: there is always a point on the road when one can map a new one. And try to follow it. There is no person alive who cannot make a new beginning.”
While delivering its program in jails and prisons across the country, the Social Development and Recovery of Values Association also began training prison staff—staff who now speak of how treating inmates with compassion and respect goes a long way toward reducing violence in their jails.
“When you treat inmates with dignity,” said the undersecretary of the Guerrero state prison system, “you can get a positive response from them.”
“I see how [the inmates] start to transform their lives,” said a staff member who delivers the program. “They realize the mistakes they’ve made and how they can be better when they get out of prison.”
“The change is profound,” said another. “It changes the way they act, how they dress—they shine when compared with other inmates.”
“You show that there’s hope,” said yet another prison staff member. “You show [inmates] there’s a different way to do things. You provide them with tools to be a better person.”
As a result of the program’s success, the head of the Ministry of Public Security in Guerrero asked the Cordero team to train 10 of the state’s superior court judges on The Way to Happiness. The training led judges to realize the impact they can have on the entire penitentiary system.
“What I am trying to recover for myself, for my family, for the society are values,” said Cordero. “We will continue and we will have a better future for Mexico, and flourish and prosper with The Way to Happiness.”
