S20 Ep63: Bear Witness: The Pursuit Of Justice In A Violent Land w/Ross Halperin

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4.8 • 3.2K Ratings

🗓️ 27 May 2025

⏱️ 54 minutes

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Summary

True Crime Tuesday Presents: Bear Witness: The Pursuit Of Justice In A Violent Land with Journalist/ Author, Ross Halperin!

As young men, Kurt Ver Beek, an American sociologist, and Carlos Hernández, a Honduran schoolteacher, devoted their lives to helping the poor. But it wasn’t until they moved to Nueva Suyapa— an extraordinarily dangerous neighborhood in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa—that they came to a radical conclusion: The charity world was combating poverty incorrectly.

In gripping prose, journalist Ross Halperin chronicles how these two best friends became quasi vigilantes and charged into a series of life-and-death battles through their grassroots organization, The Association for a More Just Society (ASJ): first with the gang that terrorized their community, then with a notorious tycoon who commanded about a thousand-armed men, and finally with a police force whose corruption and brutality defied credulity. Their efforts made some of the most violent neighborhoods on earth safer and arguably improved the functioning of a national government, but in the process of pulling that off, they compromised their principles, precipitated collateral damage, and acquired their share of outraged critics.

On today's program, we talk with Ross about how a program like ASJ could work in the inner cities here in America, how it was offered to Chicago almost two decades ago, the positives of community involvement and how much quicker things could get done, and the drawbacks that the American justice system could provide considering the success that ASJ had was in a third world country....

Get your copy of "Bear Witness..." here: https://bit.ly/3FlNFnE

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#crime #truecrime #truecrimepodcasts #truecrimetuesday #rosshalperin #bearwitness #thepursuitofjusticeinaviolentland #kurtverbeek #carloshernandez #honduras #nuevasuyapa #tegucigalpa #asj #associationforamorejustsociety #murder #gangs #drugtrafficking #governmentcorruption #policecorruption #citizenjustice

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome into the Bastion True Crime Podcasting.
0:25.5	This is True Crime Tuesday.
0:26.5	I'm your host Tim Dennis.
0:28.0	I want you guys to imagine something real quick.
0:30.6	I want you to imagine inner city America where the gang problem is solved not just by the police,
0:38.5	but solved by everyday citizens working within a charitable organization.
0:45.0	And a structure where you and I, lawyers, barristers,
0:52.5	everyday citizens can get together, team up with the police, we can work as one
0:57.1	organization, get together, and solve inner city crime, guns, everything, and work together
1:07.0	and get the murder rate, the crime rate, drugs, everything off the streets and make
1:12.9	everything safer. I know you may be saying, Tim, it's La La Land. It'll never happen. What if I told
1:18.9	you that my guest today not only has found that solution that it's been brought up to the city of
1:24.0	Chicago, but that it happened.
1:29.9	And it happened in the country of Honduras.
1:37.7	My guest today, Ross Halperin, has a brand new book out there, and he's studied this for decades.
1:41.0	And this book is fantastic, folks.
1:45.5	The name of the book is Bear Witness, The Pursuit of Justice in a Violent Land.
1:54.6	And when you read this book, it's going to curl your hair how much violence was in this land, how much corruption was in this land.
2:05.3	Not just by drug lords, not just by criminals, but by the actual establishment, by security companies, by everyone,
2:12.5	and how much this one charitable organization had to try to overcome in order to work with the people, the poor, the regular citizens of Honduras to try to take back their land.
2:18.4	Let me tell you a little bit about Ross, and then we'll bring them in.
2:21.4	Ross Halperin is a man who has dedicated himself to this very issue.
	...

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