Border patrol

Lourdes Portillo's Señorita extraviada mines the mystery of Mexico's women factory-worker murders.

By Robert Avila

Juárez, Mexico, is a model town of the new global economy, a NAFTA-enabled haven of cheap labor where foreign (mostly U.S.-owned) companies can perch their maquiladoras, or factories, just across the border from the United States. Juárez is also a city reeling from a decade-long sequence of murders targeted exclusively at young women of the type who make up the majority of the maquiladora workers. Acclaimed Bay Area filmmaker Lourdes Portillo's new documentary suggests these two statistics are not unrelated. Señorita extraviada (Missing Young Woman), which won the special jury prize at Sundance this year, investigates the more than 200 murders of young women that local officials and the Mexican police have proved unable to stop. Needless to say, this story goes largely unnoticed in the United States. I spoke with Portillo shortly before the opening of her film at the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival this week.

Bay Guardian: How did you find out about these murders and when did you decide to make a film about them?

Lourdes Portillo: I saw an article in The Nation that talked about these girls who were being found dead. They were mutilated, their bodies were destroyed, they had been raped, and they were young girls who worked in maquiladoras [foreign-owned factories in the border region of Mexico]. And part of the dialogue at that time, this is about four or five years, was that it was the girls' fault to a certain extent because they were being so provocative.

BG: What was The Nation's take?

LP: The Nation was talking about machismo and how the girls had jobs and the men didn't have jobs, and it created some kind of anger. It was strange. I never could get a handle on it. It never occurred to me – I'm Mexican – that men would actually kill women because women had jobs and they didn't.

BG: So these interpretations didn't make much sense to you.

LP: None of it made sense to me. Because it was such an American take on it. And the accusations that were being made by the government officials about the girls being kind of sluttish, I knew what that was about: we want nothing to do with it; it's their fault. Blaming the victim. So I decided, because I am from that part of Mexico, from the north of Mexico, I probably could find out more than they could. So I started undertaking the process, which was very complicated because it has to do with fundraising.

BG: Was it particularly hard to get funds for this kind of film?

LP: No. At this time in my career – I'm not a young filmmaker anymore – it's a little bit easier for me to get funds. So it wasn't that difficult, though it was very time-consuming, and when the money would come, and when I was able to go, those were not always coherent. So it took about two and a half years to make from start to finish.

GA: You're going into the middle of an ongoing case, an unsolved mystery. Some of your previous films have also concerned mysteries. Was it familiar territory in that sense? How do you approach a subject that's not really closed, that doesn't have an answer yet?

BG: Because it was not solved, because it was a mystery – that attracted me more than anything to it. The mysteries I've dealt with in the past were more like family mysteries – provocative to a certain extent – but this one was harrowing. Because of the murders, the extent of death and secrecy and horror around, it was just too much. I never really expected it to be as bad as I found it.

BG: Almost as disturbing as the murders is the fact that almost no one seems to be talking about them in the United States. Why do you think that is?

LP: I think what's happened is that it's been going on for nearly ten years, it's become like a daily occurrence. It's become common. So people don't pay attention to it anymore. And also, you have to remember, these are brown young Mexican women that no one cares about. Nobody. That's why I think it's just become a part of everyday life. This is what happens in Juárez, and you just let it happen, and nobody does anything. There have been some reports here in the U.S., but they've also been misdirected, I think. There's never really been a very acute view of the situation.

BG: Whereas your film looks very acutely at the situation, going as far as to suggest that there's more than just a dark irony about the idea of Juárez as a model town of the new global economy.

LP: I think what's happening in the new globalized economy around the Mexican border – and that's what I can speak about – is the fact that everything has been instituted for profit, and the profit of large corporations, and the profit of the corrupt Mexican government, but it's not put in place for the protection of the workers. I think in the new globalized economy this is not just going to happen in Juárez; it can happen anywhere. If you're trying to find cheap labor, the youngest people to come and work at your assembly plants, it's going to bring out the syndrome of the wolf in the chicken coop. I think the maquiladoras and the Mexican government should feel responsible for this and should try to protect these girls as much as they can. But if you're just seeking profit then this will occur over and over again.

BG: Is this how you read it going in, or did this dawn on you in the course of making the film? How much of the film was evolving as you made it?

LP: It was all evolving. It was like peeling an onion. I went in there with some preconceived notions about certain things. I was almost certain that there was a lone killer. I was made to believe that from watching Mexican television and from reading the newspapers in the U.S. There was one serial killer. I even believed that it was the Egyptian [Sharif Sharif, shown in the film]. And slowly, as I met people, and things were revealing themselves to us, we started seeing something very different: this enormous web of complicity and silence.

BG: Who do you think is responsible for these murders?

LP: From what I know and what I've heard I wouldn't even venture to guess. I would say a lot of people; many people are involved. The ones that are directly responsible, even if they didn't kill the girls themselves, is the Mexican government. They should respond to the citizenship and say, "We're going to take care of this, whatever this is. We're going to put all of our intelligence behind it." Which hasn't happened. The federal government hasn't gone in there to investigate it. This continues to be a state [of Chihuahua] problem, which is a very corrupt state, so you're never going to get anywhere. But that's not to say that the whole country is as corrupt. I think there're many voices that wanting justice, and the greatest crime is impunity – that people can actually kill someone and not get punished. But I think that comes from the fact that if the most powerful are killing girls and getting away with it, then any other opportunist killer can come and do the same.

BG: The complicity between the underworld and the elite is one of the more disturbing assertions to come out of the film, this symbiotic relationship that takes place at the expense of everyone in between.

LP: Exactly.

BG: In dealing with a subject like this, involving the extreme victimization of women, how conscious are you of the gaze of your camera on your subjects? What decisions or choices did you make in deciding how to approach the images of these women?

LP: Well, you have to understand, filmmakers have to choose everything. Nothing is casual. Nothing is accidental. So every image and every choice has to be made by the director around how you are going to treat the women. For example, there was a decision not to use any of the dead bodies that were completely mutilated and destroyed and burned. They are horrific to look at, and there's plenty of pictures of that. Charles Bowden edited a book, Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future, where there're these horrific pictures of women. I think it degrades the issue to the extent that it becomes a voyeuristic indulgence. I made the choice to use live girls instead of any dead bodies. We have skeletons, which are bones, and they're not as bad to look at as a mutilated girl, but we have live girls so that you can have a more humane sentiment, where you feel, "These are the girls that they killed." So everything was carefully chosen.

BG: What was one of the more unexpected things that you encountered in the making of the film? Were you surprised, for example, by the quiet, almost unassuming courage manifested by many of the family members and residents of Juárez?

LP: This is the north of Mexico, it's the "wild west" of Mexico, and it's where people are really very blunt and very honest in their responses. I did expect them to be like tigresses protecting their children, and they were. But at the same time, I felt that there was this blanket of fear that silenced most everybody. That took me a long time to chip away at, to get pieces of the puzzle together. No one would really come forth, and I know that there're thousands of people that know what's happening, who could just say, "Look it's like this," and like that, and they could say it to me in three sentences. But everyone is so fearful that they won't speak. And it took so long to put the pieces of the puzzle together. I think the most stunning thing for me was how fear can silence a whole city of millions of people, especially one so close to the United States. That was the hardest thing to take.

BG: This is a story that very much involves the United States.

LP: Deeply.

BG: What is your response to the recent and ubiquitous talk about a war on terror? I wonder how it strikes you as someone who has just finished documenting a story of such intense and ongoing terrorizing of a population and it's more vulnerable members.

LP: Well, it's very ironic. I think they're using it the way they do marketing for things, the war on terror. Terror, for me, having done this film, is right there. And that's terror that is so horrific, and nothing is being done about it. Let's do a war on that terror. But I don't see anybody really doing anything about it. It sounds much better to get thousands of troops to go into another country with billions of dollars in armaments and destroy the place looking for one person than to actually address a problem that is so rooted in this culture, in this culture of extraordinary consumerism. And I'm talking about drug consumption. We are disgusting. We consume more drugs than anybody in the world. And the trail of blood and terror and suffering that it causes is ignored.

BG: Do you see yourself as compensating for the lack of information and critical interpretation?

LP: Those are big shoes to fill. But being in San Francisco, having gone through the '60s and '70s, the upheaval and the culture, and my willingness to look things squarely in the face, is very valuable for all of us. I feel I have a role to play. It's not a sole role. There are a lot of people like me who do the same thing. But we take it seriously.

BG: Does that function ever conflict with your role as an artist?

LP: I've never felt any conflict between my political stance and my art. I think those two things work together really well. There have been prejudices about using political statements or political stances in art, that it's devalued, but I don't think there's such a conflict at all. I think that both things can work really beautifully together, to great effect.

BG: What is it that film can do that other media can't?

LP: It seems to me that part of it has to do with the fact that you can really convey a lot of sentiment, because it's moving pictures. Well, I think some paintings can evoke that. But somehow there's a level of manipulation that you have accessible to you; if you want to touch people's hearts you can do it, if you want to touch their minds or their aesthetic sense, you can do all that. You have an hour and a half to do it. It's like a performance in a way, a performance that gets repeated over and over again.

Señiorita extraviada is the opening-night feature of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival. It screens Fri/22, 7 p.m., with the filmmaker in person, at the Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk. $7. (510) 642-5249. Also Sat/23, 3:30 p.m., and Mon/25, 7:15 p.m., Cinequest San Jose Film Festival, 366 South First St., San Jose. $8. (408) 998-3022, www.cinequest.org. The documentary, which was funded by the San Francisco-based Independent Television Service, will be broadcast on the POV on PBS this summer.