Maria Teresa Almada

In an urban, border environment pervaded by broken dreams of a better life in the United States, where the best prospect most young people can hope for is employment in the maquiladora factories on the U.S.-Mexico border. Teresa Almada is developing a new approach to the prevention and treatment of drug abuse among adolescents.

Among the inner-city neighborhoods of Ciudad Juárez, tantalizingly close to the Texas border, Teresa Almada has spent over a decade working with adolescents and their concerns. As she dealt with more and more cases of young lives shattered by substance dependence, she realized that very few of her cases involved teenagers with real psychological disorders. Teresa is convinced that the majority of adolescents turning to drugs do so primarily because of dysfunction in their relationships to family members or the surrounding community. She argues that the malaise provoked by the rupture of social ties is compounded by environmental factors, such as high unemployment and limited opportunity, which lead teenagers to question the very purpose of their lives and encourage them to seek solace in drugs, even when they are rationally aware of deleterious effects on their health.Based on this analysis, Teresa began to pioneer a new model of community intervention for the prevention of teenage substance abuse. Three years ago she founded the Center for Assistance and Promotion of Youth (CASA, or "home") in Ciudad Juárez, and began training "youth workers" in skills they would need to reach out to other sectors of the community, such as parents, teachers, police, and business people. She has developed a methodology that brings groups of teenage drug users together with members of other age and social groups, to discuss the images each has of the other, and the ways in which their relationships could be improved. By sponsoring a series of events focused on rebuilding broken relationships in the community, and by impressing on the parents, teachers, and friends of drug users that their own behaviors may also need to change, Teresa has created an innovative drug prevention and treatment program. This program is inexpensive, (and therefore accessible to poor people), community-based, and holds the potential for much broader social impact than expensive, individually-focused rehabilitation plans. This "rebuilding relationships" approach to community problem solving may also be applicable to efforts to reintegrate other socially marginalized groups.

While the scourge of teenage drug abuse afflicts urban areas around the world, Ciudad Juárez has particularly high rates of use, perhaps because it is a major hub for traffickers of illicit substances on the route from other South American countries to the United States. Among marginal communities of the city, CASA surveys suggest that up to 50 percent of young men aged 15 to 25 years consume drugs on a regular basis, with a steady growth in the number of female users and a resurgence in the popularity of heroin. The language and culture of drug use pervades the city's neighborhoods and is becoming the medium through which young people communicate. The allure of substance abuse is more pronounced in a region where the only employment option (short of fleeing across the border into the U.S.) is the manual labor of the maquiladoras, which requires very little educational background and has come to constitute something of a disincentive to young people to pursue their studies beyond middle school. As young drug users resort to crime or intimidation to finance their habits, their behavior is perceived to be more and more antisocial, and other age groups begin to blame youth for a whole range of social ills.

The prevailing paradigm in efforts across the industrialized world to prevent the use of drugs by teenagers involves a combination of education programs–teaching students the names and effects of each different type of drug–with publicity campaigns and slogans designed to scare or convince young people to avoid the substances ("Just Say No"). These prevention programs tend not to address the root causes of why drugs are attractive to teenagers in the first place. When they fail, and a youngster begins to use drugs, the issue is usually treated as an individual problem; the youth is punished, expelled from school, and if his parents can afford it he is sent away from the community to a treatment center that will focus on his personal and psychological maladjustment. While such centers sometimes succeed in helping adolescents overcome addictions, it is also common that those who appear to have been "rehabilitated" often fall back into their former habits when they return to the multiple influences of the environment in which they first succumbed.

Teresa's model is designed to be implemented by organizations that have earned credibility and recognition through several years of immersion in a given community. It is predicated on a precise "mapping" of the neighborhoods, according to the boundaries that young people themselves observe, as well as on knowledge of and acquaintance with other members of the local social fabric, including extended families, schools, businesses, churches, and community groups with which young people interact in some way. Teresa trains her CASA staff to identify the key relationships between young people and each of the other social groups within the neighborhood, to work separately with each subset on an analysis of their perceptions of and relationships to young people, and to consider changes in their own attitudes and actions that might bridge the gaps between themselves and the adolescents. The staff then facilitate encounters in which the young people and each of the "offended" groups negotiate specific efforts they can undertake to establish greater trust and mutual respect. At the same time, CASA works with local business leaders and municipal officials on job creation strategies for youth. These parallel initiatives are designed to address the fundamental causes of drug abuse–the breakdown in the relationship between young people and their communities, and their loss of hope and purpose that results from lack of discernable employment opportunities.

Teresa is still consolidating and refining the model at CASA, but she is already planning to expand beyond the twelve neighborhoods where the program is currently working into new areas of Ciudad Juárez. At the same time, she is training social workers and students in the principles of her coordinated community intervention, and cultivating an emerging relationship with the local chamber of commerce which will produce new employment and training options for young people. Teresa has integrated CASA into a Mexican network called Collective Action for Youth and perceives a strong desire on the part of other network members for a new approach to the prevention and treatment of drug abuse. Her plan is to replicate her model through these partner organizations so as to achieve broader impact throughout Mexico. She is currently editing a set of materials that systematize the experience of CASA and has launched a series of workshops to share her methodology with other institutions. She has also made contact with youth organizations in Chile, Colombia, and Guatemala and aims to pass her model to them.

Teresa has been fascinated with youth work since she was an adolescent and joined a parish group. Through this experience she came to know the marginal communities of Ciudad Juárez and to form relationships with children and families that have endured to this day. She went on to train as a social worker and also taught at an alternative secondary school for a time, but she was always drawn back to exploring the nature of relationships and the construction of community social fabric. As coordinator of an inter-parochial project to promote encounters among youth groups, Teresa became interested in the concept of training others to identify and work from the complex web of relationships that link teenagers to other discernible groups in the community, and this desire gave rise to the formulation of a pilot project to test the rehabilitative effects of rebuilding social links that had been frayed by adolescent substance abuse. This project eventually grew into the Center for Assistance and Promotion of Youth, which Teresa founded in 1994.