As an outsider, the story of Abra as depicted in various news outlets, much like this one, is a fascinating and horrifying show. It would appear that every single week, there is an act of extreme violence of some sort in that province, and as an outsider whose only interaction with the province is in the regular news report of so-and-so got shot, going off of entirely what I see on the news, it would seem that the populace of Abra is divided into two categories: shooters and targets.
From an outsider’s perspective, it would appear as if Abra is this strange, isolated and violent equivalent to the Galapagos — an ecosystem entirely preserved in its own amber, its own discrete shell, with little regard to the external pressures of the world. The province is an isolated environment whose apparent evolutionary terminus is assassination attempts with your motorcycle and small-to-medium-caliber arms of choice.
Naturally, there is more to the province than that, and what we are seeing is only the small subset of data that makes it through the filters and ends up being reported on news outlets. But for those of us who are not from there and only know of it tangentially from the public media, it is a province whose entire existence revolves around weekly shootings and violence that somehow flares up harder during politically charged times.
This makes Abra all sorts of anthropologically important; an educational case study wrapped in gunsmoke. This little pressure cooker of violent feuds and old grudges has much to teach us.
But this view also reduces the province and its populace to observable variables. Inhuman. Mere color-coded data points.
Obviously, Abreños are significantly more than mere data, and this ties into the spates of violence themselves –- no amount of outside analysis will get rid of this tendency towards gunshot, as the solution there must be rooted in the community itself.
First, of course, is the identification of the cause of all this violence, which is not quite possible without immersing oneself in the community and accepting a certain level of risk. While it is easy to dismiss the proclivity to violence as the act of individuals, it is easy to see that there is a je ne sais quoi to Abra that allows this proclivity to take root and result in actual violence.
Still, it is a matter that is worth studying and acting upon; there are lives at stake here at any given moment. There is no greater tragedy than the loss of lives, and there is perhaps very little more tragic than when the loss of life is the norm, an accepted way of life.
It bears study, this fascinating and tragic violence — not only for academics sake, but for practical purposes; we could glean better methods of violence prevention from this, and save lives.
