A protest in paint

The police haven’t managed to solve it. Neither has the Mexican government. Even the poking and prodding of the international news media so far has failed to crack the eerie wall of silence surrounding the murdered women of Ciudad Juarez.

Now, another group is pushing for answers and, ultimately, justice in the dusty industrial town across from El Paso, Texas: artists.

On Saturday hundreds if not thousands of people will converge on the border to march, mourn, make speeches, hold discussions and raise awareness of the hundreds of women who’ve gone missing and in many cases turned up murdered in Ciudad Juarez and other parts of Chihuahua state. Some victims also had been raped and mutilated.

Among those expected to take part in the activities will be actors Sally Field, Christine Lahti and Jane Fonda; a contingent of students from L.A.’s private Marlborough School and some of their mothers and teachers; and playwright Eve Ensler (“The Vagina Monologues”), whose V-Day Foundation, a nonprofit organization aimed at ending violence against women, is co-sponsoring the events with Amnesty International, the human rights group. Amnesty says that at least 370 young women have “disappeared” or been murdered in the vicinity of Ciudad Juarez since 1993; Mexican authorities put the number at around 260.

But another Los Angeles participant also intends to make itself heard about the grisly phenomenon -- even though it won’t be saying a word. It’s a large-scale mural created by four L.A.-based artists on behalf of Amnesty to honor the spirit of the slain women. Measuring about 8 feet high by 40 feet wide, the monumental work uses jarring illustration, Pop Art symbolism and twists on traditional Mexican iconography both to convey the agony caused by the brutal crimes and to suggest the complicated social context that may have given rise to them. One element represents a faceless Virgin of Guadalupe, her body composed of twisting cactus limbs, encircled by an aura of long black machetes that morph into crosses. Another depicts two women pleading with a stern-faced man with a gun.

The four artists, all known by single names -- Kofie, Axis, Jiah and Eder, the group’s organizer -- began their careers doing graffiti on the streets of Los Angeles and have since established themselves as graphic artists, clothing designers and muralists. But they hope that their collective background in street art may give the work an immediacy and accessibility that will help expose the Ciudad Juarez situation to a larger audience. “At least we can bring peoples’ awareness to it,” says Kofie.

The mural, which will be displayed during the Valentine’s Day march, is but one example of how Amnesty is forging relationships with artists and using artworks to raise awareness of human rights issues, says Bonnie Abaunza, director of L.A.-based Artists for Amnesty, a nearly 3-year-old program of Amnesty International USA, which started with about 40 members and now numbers about 2,000. “We’re going to force the hand of the Mexican government” to solve the crimes, says Abaunza, who spent 15 years in the entertainment industry, mostly as a film and TV producer, before becoming Amnesty International’s chief liaison to the artistic community. “We’re going to get more and more artists involved and inundate them with petitions.”

Amnesty also has begun an annual film festival at the Directors Guild of America to showcase what it deems to be significant, politically conscious movies. Among the films to be shown at this year’s festival May 12 to 16 will be Hector Babenco’s “Carandiru.”

Film stars Salma Hayek, Nicolas Cage, Benicio Del Toro and Glenn Close are among the Hollywood stars supporting Amnesty’s work in Ciudad Juarez, along with the National Assn. of Independent Latino Producers and filmmaker Lourdes Portillo, whose influential documentary “Senorita Extraviada” chronicles the spread of the serial killings. It also investigates possible connections between the slayings and narcotics trafficking, examines the apparent ineptitude of some legal authorities in solving the cases and looks at the restless social conditions along the border, where global free trade is epitomized by the light-assembly plants, or maquiladoras, where many of the young women worked.

Last fall, Amnesty International and the Chicano Studies Research Center of UCLA sponsored what was said to be the first international conference on the Juarez situation. More than 1,500 people attended the three-day event.

The Juarez mural was unveiled last month at Headquarters, an art salon near Hollywood Boulevard, where the four artists had spent several weeks working on the piece. It was part of a group show, “Beyond Graffiti,” curated by Headquarters owner Lemuel Serrano. “These guys learn their skills [by] moving fast,” Serrano says, referring to the artists’ background in graffiti. “That’s what I find is the beauty of the art form: It’s spontaneous.”

After this weekend’s events, Abaunza says, the mural may be donated to a nongovernmental organization in Ciudad Juarez. But art-making about the women may continue for a long time. “Art also has an ability to reach past political rhetoric,” says actor and musician Michele Greene (“L.A. Law”), who attended the mural unveiling, and performed a song she wrote called “Ciudad Juarez” at last fall’s UCLA conference. “So I think the more artists who get involved in this, the better.”