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Señorita Extraviada--Missing Young Woman

A video documentary by Lourdes Portillo

By Carol Amoruso, HAV Editor

"Señorita Extraviada" opens with footage of night in a seamy town.  A jam of automobiles slowly cruise crowded streets of girls in short skirts and nylon jackets illuminated by a strand of neon and the haze of headlights. This could be Hong Kong, or Bangkok, or the old Las Vegas, but this is bordertown, Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, pitstop along the drug route where sex and drugs could always be had cheap and divorces were arranged lickety-split before laws were relaxed in the States.  It's a town that has exploded in recent years to a population of over 2 million, as dozens of maquiladoras spring up, luring masses of work-hungry young women from impoverished pueblos in the Mexican countryside.

Nearly 250 girls in their late teens or early twenties have been kidnapped, gang raped, and brutally, often ritually, murdered in Juárez within the last decade.  A good number of them worked long, arduous and underpaid hours in the maquiladoras.  The authorities are unmoved by the crimes, and the press, both on the other side of the border, and in Mexico, is disinterested.  Ms. Portillo, who has treated other highly-charged issues filmographically, such as the desaparecidos of Argentina, has tackled this story because, she says, it has to be told.

Over 18 months Portillo traced the last known steps of many of the girls, interviewed their families and friends, and sought out those involved and disinvolved in the hunt for the killers.  She recalled the experience to me one recent afternoon during a screening of "Señorita Extraviada" at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in New York:  "It was painful to witness the grief of the family, to witness the helplessness of the population, to witness the state terror that is being imposed on the people who can't speak out because they are afraid to die.  And then the editing part was also very painful.  So, it's all been quite painful, but somebody's got to speak out. "

"Señorita Extraviada" asks more questions than it answers, most pointedly, Why would anyone commit such heinous crimes against women, and what forces are at work insuring that the guilty are not found?  With no answers --" I'm not an investigative reporter.  I was trained as an artist.  I'm a filmmaker and I’m looking to tell the story as it seems to me."--"Señorita Extraviada" becomes an even more unsettling film.

Portillo has said that "Señorita Extraviada" is an exploration of truth, not the truth of a whodunit, but a penetration of why people are truthful in such extreme situations, and why they are not. 

Abdel Latif Sharif is an Egyptian national who served time in the States for child molestation.  He has been detained for nearly two years for the Juárez crimes.  And yet the rapes, the murders, the dismembering continue.  Irene Blanco signed on immediately to Sharif's defense.  A patrician, poised woman, who did not need to tackle this maddening case, she speaks convincingly of Sharif's innocence and points squarely at the state authorities as complicit, at least, in the crimes if not actual perpetrators.  I learned later from Lourdes Portillo that the life of Blanco's son has been threatened, she has had to flee.

Suly Ponce, on the other hand, Special Prosecutor in Juárez investigating the murders, seems flippant and dismissive of the families of the victims who appeal to her.  "Oh, she's probably just with her boyfriend," she rattles to two desperate parents whose daughter had gone missing and was never found.  Ponce made no breakthroughs in the case.  But she has been rewarded with a promotion.

Maria is the closest we come to a witness.  She came forward after a harrowing experience:  She and her husband were sentenced to an overnighter in the stationhouse for a minor infraction.  Her head bowed, her voice just above a whisper, yet her expression revealing determination, Maria recounts that she was raped and then further violated by the police who forced her to view photographs of the rapes and murders of a number of the girls.  Released, her first day on the job at a maquiladora, she spied a man there she swears she saw in the photos.  Portillo is telling us that, while, for the authorities the killers are nowhere to be found, for the people of Juárez, they are everywhere.  Maria narrowly escaped being kidnapped, and she lives, day to day, knowing her life and that of her family is in danger, but, still, she speaks out.  Maria has everything to lose by telling the truth.

I asked Lourdes Portillo why?  How could there be a whole society of killers of young women?  It was incomprehensible to me. 

"It has to do with attitudes towards poor women and their value," she replied, confident, as of someone to whom deep understanding had come.  "A poor woman is not worth anything if she can be disposed of as an animal.  You can just grab any girl on the street, destroy her and throw her away--that is the idea, I think, in the mind of these killers.   But it's also kind of a pervasive attitude."

The day after our talk, there was an article in the New York Times ("Women's Rights: Why Not?", by Nicholas D. Kristof; June 18, 2002) about the United States' refusal to sign the international treaty banning discrimination against women (Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women).  The article cited the case of a Pakistani woman:

"He [my husband] would grab my hair, throw me on the floor and beat me with sticks," she recalled. Finally she ran away.

Her husband found her, tied her to the bed, wired a metal rod to a 220-volt electrical outlet and forced it into her vagina. Surgeons managed to save her life, but horrific internal burns forced them to remove her bladder, urethra, vagina and rectum….

Each year about one million girls in the third world die because of mistreatment and discrimination.

I realized fully then that we women in the metropolitan countries fight our battles on a different turf and for different stakes.  We fight against glass ceilings, for reproductive rights, for equitable gender roles at home; we fight for equality and that's great, but (the vast majority of us) we are not fighting for our lives.  That other struggle of women is what Lourdes Portillo has witnessed and is making us feel.

The film, in not pointing a finger at an accused--not even at the accused—but by exposing instead the perils of the maquiladoras to women especially, and by forcing us to confront the vulnerability of young girls chained to a sewing machine, or working as a maid, or in the sex trade, suggests that we are all complicit in these 250 and rising deaths.

It is the system of globalization to which Portillo points an ultimate finger: "I feel that we're all complicit, because we're such consumers.  We consume all the drugs in the world, we consume most of everything in the world, and those people are there [in the maquiladoras] because they're making things for us to consume.  In every sense of the word."

I asked Lourdes Portillo if she'd like to add anything to our interview. She did.  She hoped, she said, that people would write their congressperson, asking the United States authorities to assist the Mexicans in a full investigation to bring the killers to justice.  "If the Americans pressure the Mexicans, that will work.  It probably won't work if we write a letter to Fox [Vicente Fox, President of Mexico]."