When an FBI informant told the bureau in late 1999 that a farm in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, contained the remains of more than 200 casualties of the city's violent drug wars, the Mexican and American governments acted immediately. Law-enforcement officials from both countries rushed to the ranch, digging up the grounds but eventually discovering only nine bodies. Nevertheless, the investigation attracted worldwide media attention, even garnering a front-page article in the New York Times.
What that story and many other English-language news outlets failed to report, however, was the bizarre commotion outside the crime scene: a group of protesters angrily denouncing Juárez officials as they went about their duties.
These dissenters were relatives of some of the more than 300 young women whose raped and mutilated corpses dotted the outskirts of the desert city throughout the 1990s. They were begging the Mexican authorities to allocate the same resources and interest to the horrific murders they were giving to the FBI informant's claims. But the ranch case was an important battle in the war on drugs, went the government line, and therefore needed as much attention as possible. Unsolved killings of poor, young, migrant women? Not of concern to Mexico—the señoritas were asking for it, anyway.
This is the horrific conclusion of Señorita Extraviada(Missing Young Woman), an unnerving 2001 documentary that unflinchingly examines the Juárez slayings—which continue to this day. Almost as disturbing as the images and harrowing descriptions of the massacre is the film's exposure of governmental indifference to the plight of women in the border metropolis of 1.5 million.
Señorita Extraviada's director, Lourdes Portillo, is familiar with the obstacles women encounter in publicizing their suffering under a male-dominated government. She previously directed 1986's The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, an excellent documentary detailing the efforts of Argentine mothers to discover the fates of their children who were disappeared during the country's Dirty War. The Argentine government eventually succumbed to the women's demands for full disclosure after they attracted worldwide scrutiny toward their nation. But the Juárez killing spree continues, Portillo argues, because the Mexican government continues to operate under a code of machismo that prohibits any sense of urgency to stop the violence—and even prohibits empathy.
The 74-minute film opens with a chilling prologue. “I came to Juarez to track down ghosts—and to talk to the people who saw them,” Portillo narrates, as she interviews a woman who relates her own rape in the city about 30 years ago. The woman narrowly averted death in that incident, but the daughter she was pregnant with at the time of her assault wouldn't be so lucky. At age 20, the girl became one of the first victims of the Juárez killings.
Señorita Extraviadagoes on to give a thorough overview of the Mexican government's tragically comic attempts to solve the murders. In 1995, officials arrested Egyptian national Abdel Latif Sharif and declared the crime wave over. But the murders continued. Juárez police detained nine members of the Rebeldes gang the following year, alleging Sharif hired them to make it seem a serial killer was still at large. But the murders continued. In 1999, officials insisted they had cracked the case after a woman identified four bus drivers who had raped and tortured her. But the murders continued.
Indeed, the specter of slaughter haunts Señorita Extraviada. As a motif, Portillo returns to various shots of weathered Juárez telephone poles painted a soft pink with a black cross to commemorate the deceased. Grainy photos of some of these women interrupt the flow of the film, their names and the date of their discovery flashing on the screen. They're the lucky ones; more than 100 bodies remain unidentified. And near the film's conclusion, Portillo somberly reveals that authorities found 50 more women in the 18 months it took her to make the film.
Portillo wisely doesn't seek any definite answers, but she spares no wrath in blaming a Mexican police force—so incompetent they burned 1,000 pounds of evidence to make room for more evidence—as implicit in the butchery. Her most able ally in denouncing criminal investigators is not the many interviews with local activists but archival footage of those in charge of inspecting the murders making crass, utterly sexist remarks. For example, Chihuahua's governor appeared on a television program in the early 1990s in which he blamed the women for their deaths, suggesting that their short skirts and pretty looks condemned them to their bloody fate.
A couple of years later, the state's attorney general argued that nothing bad would ever happen to Juárez's women if only they'd follow a midnight curfew. Portillo's excerpt shows him obviously fidgeting after a female journalist points out that many women get out of work or enter work at midnight. It's obvious he and his department didn't give a damn about what was happening to the women of Juárez. They still don't, for that matter.
Señorita Extraviada screens at the Centro Cultural de México, 1522 S. Main, Santa Ana, (714) 953-9305. Fri., 7 p.m. $2.
