The gang truce movement that grew out of the Los Angeles riots of April 1991 has spread to some 40-50 urban regions across America. While many have curbed gang killing, truce organizers have found it difficult to create positive alternatives to replace gang life. PNS associate editor Beatriz Johnston Hernandez is a West Coast staff writer for Processo and a contributor to the Oakland-based bi-monthly Third Force.

LOS ANGELES -- In the midst of the Los Angeles riots, three gangs hammered out the Watts truce. Four years after its April signing, the cease-fire shows the potential and the difficulty of peace in the ghetto.

Since then, between 40 to 50 cease fires involving several thousand young people are holding in cities previously known for endless bloodletting -- like South Central Los Angeles, East Los Angeles County, Long Beach and Venice, San Antonio, Chicago. Drive-by shootings are significantly down in West Los Angeles and Long Beach, home to two of southern California's cross-ethnic truces. The "vast majority of people in the five major (black) projects of Los Angeles are participating in some form with the gang truce," says former Black Panther Michael Zinzun, director of the Community in Support of the Gang Truce (CSGT), with the result that carnage has dropped by some 20 percent in South Central Los Angeles.

But truce organizers have found that curbing the killings -- while a necessary first step -- is often easier than creating something positive in its place. In those neighborhoods where gang violence co-mingled with drug dealing and extortion, like Long Beach, the dealing and extortion goes on.

"Kids deal drugs so they can feed their kids and pay the rent. Unless we give them viable alternatives, they're going to continue to sell drugs," says Rev. Greg Boyle, director of Jobs for the Future, a Catholic non-profit organization that sits in the middle of this city's most balkanized area, East Los Angeles.

Truce organizers admit the only real alternative to gang violence will come with a massive infusion of economic development programs, therapy, job training and a political voice. And despite the publicity around truces, the government is in no mood for peace-making strategies. In late March, president Bill Clinton declared a one-strike edict against drug-dealing tenants in public housing. This year, even Los Angeles is withdrawing all the monies it devotes to teen summer jobs.

Police in Chicago argue gang truces there are mere fronts for drug dealing. Gang crime officers in East Los Angeles County are convinced intra-community truces have resulted in previously rival gangs uniting into larger gangs that now face off bigger rivals.

And some truces simply haven't held. Ray Balberon of San Francisco-based Real Alternative Project isn't surprised. "Calling for a truce without a backup program is difficult," he says. "Do we have resources to deliver? Employment, schools?"

Gang mediator Jim Hernandez, a veteran of gang banging who now works with the Concord, Calif., police gang task force, sees gangs becoming increasingly atomized. He says the "peewees" who are still invested in making a name for themselves "don't want to take orders from anybody," including gang elders, who are more inclined toward peace-making.

Although the odds are stacked against gang cease-fires, peace makers are convinced the truces that are working offer lessons in how to break the lethal cycle of attack and revenge. Most came about through community intervention that invariably involves elders and spiritual leaders.

Twilight Bey, a former Blood, recalls the countless Wednesdays at football star Jim Brown's house, one of the two sites of the peace talks that led to the Watts truce. The other was a Muslim temple in South Central Los Angeles. "Sometimes there was so much metal that if you melted it down it would become a tanker. Eventually there was no need to bring metal to the house."

The breakthrough, Bey recalls, came when participants found a common ground of humanity. "We realized ... the only way to stop the pain is to stop hurting each other ... Some of us have found some of our closest friends to be people from the other side."

Gitu Sadicki, who works with a violence-prevention program in Los Angeles, remembers the meetings at the temple. "Many reminisced about going to school together when they were little, about the invisible borders that rose up between them ... They began to remember the things they did as youngsters. The Imam allowed them to work things out for themselves, but when things got sticky, he'd step in and pray ... "

Truce activists in the Latino community describe similar methods to bring gang adversaries together. Daniel "Nane" Alejandro, who directs Barrios Unidos in Santa Cruz, Calif., attributes some of the truce holding power to new spiritual bonds among Chicanos who have turned to native American practices, like the sweat lodge.

The importance of the sweat, Alejandro says, is all about what happens when people are around the circle: "You connect to people who've been in the same situation, and so you reconnect with yourself. That's where you get that healing, by connecting to something good within you, in the realization that we're not alone."

Some truce activists hope to channel the energies that once kept gangs together into political organizing. Michael Zinzun is part of a core group calling on "10,000" African American and Chicano men and women to rally in Los Angeles on April 27. The event is planned as a celebration of the truce's anniversary and to form popular committees around electoral politics, union organizing, police brutality and economic development.

But the most enduring successes of gang peace are most evident on the individual level. Bey is now a community consultant whose pager beeps often. He does presentations at schools to explain Maer-I-Can, the curriculum created by Jim Brown to teach self-esteem and self determination. He wants to run for elective office. "Instead of banging on a negative note, I've found other ways of getting my kicks."