Exposing a Plague of Killings

They asked for it.

That seemed to be the disturbing suggestion behind the first young women who began to turn up, raped and murdered, in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. If they had not worn miniskirts or gone to nightclubs, authorities suggested, they would not have gotten into trouble. Some even dismissed the victims as prostitutes.

In reality, many were workers in the maquiladoras, the light-assembly plants that are a mainstay of the new global economy and rely on cheap female labor. Other victims were teenage schoolgirls, mothers, a Sunday school teacher.

Who is killing the young women of Ciudad Juarez? By now, the bodies of some 270 young women, some with signs of torture, have been dumped in the desert. And a growing wave of international scrutiny has focused on the inability of the authorities to halt the killings in this Mexican city across the border from El Paso, Texas.

San Francisco filmmaker Lourdes Portillo steps into this chilling murder mystery with a haunting documentary, “Senorita Extraviada” (Miss Missing), that will air on KCET-TV at 10 tonight. Portillo, a veteran documentarian whose credits include the Oscar-nominated “Las Madres: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo,” has already won a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival for “Senorita Extraviada.” She said she was drawn to the Ciudad Juarez murders by a sense of outrage.

“I found it astounding. I thought, ‘My God, this is such an injustice,’ ” said Portillo, 58. “How can anything like this have been going for 10 years and not be stopped? These are schoolgirls, from all walks of life.”

Supported by a Soros Foundation grant, and later, the MacArthur Foundation, Portillo began to interview the relatives of the victims in 1998. Their stories are searing: the father whose eyes fill with tears as he tells of his daughter’s ordeal; the brother who protected his little sister from schoolyard bullies but lost her to murderers; the mother whose daughter’s killing brought back memories of her own rape in the desert, years ago.

The murdered women smile out from photographs, optimistic and young, playing with their toddlers, or walking away from a factory in the grainy footage of a security camera. “I wanted to tell the story through the eyes of the victims,” Portillo said.

Along the way, the filmmaker hears some disquieting allegations. One woman, picked up by police and raped in jail, tells Portillo a man walked into her cell and showed her photos of men raping and killing women. Later, at a new factory job, this man turned up--as a security guard.

Suspicion of police involvement is one of a number of theories that have arisen since the women’s bodies began turning up in the early 1990s. The victims tended to be young women, with shoulder-length hair, who were sexually abused, strangled and dumped, some with telltale markings carved into their backs. Some had been asked to sit for “model” photographs at factories days before.

Official ineptitude and insensitivity became legendary. In 1999, then-Chihuahua Atty. Gen. Arturo Gonzalez Rascon suggested that the victims’ provocative clothing had aroused their attackers--attitudes that critics viewed as a backlash against cultural shifts triggered by female employment on the border.

“Women have more freedom on the border,” said Portillo, who was born in Chihuahua and moved to the United States in 1960. “They can wear a short skirt without their aunt saying it’s too short. They’re being blamed for being modern. The women don’t deserve to die because they wear miniskirts.”

Authorities arrested a group of gang members, but that failed to halt the killings. In March 1999, a bloody, dirt-streaked 14-year-old girl staggered out of the desert, saying she had been attacked by a factory bus driver. Three bus drivers were arrested. Prosecutors said an Egyptian already jailed as a murder suspect in 1995 paid the drivers $1,200 a month to kill two women a month. But more recently, a drug trafficker was arrested, reportedly wearing a woman’s body part on a chain.

“The question remains,” Portillo says, “who are the killers? The Egyptian, the Rebels gang, the bus drivers, the police, the drug traders or all of them?” The most formidable culprit, Portillo said, may be impunity. During the documentary’s 18-month production, 50 women were killed.

“Opportunistic killers come and do the same thing, knowing there’s not going to be any punishment,” she said. “My hope is to open people’s eyes and sensitize people to the plight of these girls.”

*

“Senorita Extraviada” airs on the “P.O.V.” series at 10 tonight on KCET-TV.