Time to shout

Mexico City —  Sometime soon, the ghosts of Ciudad Juarez may be coming to a movie house, TV set, bookstore, theater or CD player near you.

More than a decade after the bodies of young women and girls first began turning up along the Texas border in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua, dozens of artists in Mexico and the United States are shooting movies, performing plays, writing books, recording songs and producing television docudramas in response to what has become a human rights crisis and a binational scandal. According to Amnesty International, the bodies of at least 370 women, some raped and hideously mutilated, have been found in the area since 1993, and scores of other women are still missing.

Whether driven by a sense of moral outrage, attraction to a hot topic, fascination with a true-crime mystery or some combination of factors, artists and performers are pushing awareness of the mostly unsolved killings beyond the police blotter and the press and into the realm of popular culture. A story last month in the Mexico City daily newspaper Reforma estimated that 25 artworks and commercial projects already have been created or are underway.

At the same time, concerns are being raised on both sides of the border that the sheer number of Juarez-related projects is reaching the saturation point and that some are sensationalistic, play loose with the facts or may be more interested in the bottom line than in the body count.

“I believe that the involvement of artists is tremendously important in raising the awareness of the public about what’s happening to the women of Juarez,” says Bonnie Abaunza, director of Artists for Amnesty, an L.A.-based program of Amnesty International USA. However, she says, “you will have individuals who will unfortunately want to exploit the tragedy because it has captured the imagination of the general public.”

Among the Juarez projects are a major Mexican network TV series and mass-market pop songs, a play being staged at a small Los Angeles theater, self-financed books and independent movies. Feature films underway include “The Virgin of Juarez,” co-written and directed by Kevin James Dobson and starring Minnie Driver and Ana Claudia Talancon (“The Crime of Father Amaro”), which wrapped up shooting last month in L.A.’s Boyle Heights neighborhood.

Abaunza says she knows of at least three other Hollywood screenplays in various stages of development whose creators have sought endorsement from Amnesty International. Abaunza already has passed on two of them, which she declined to identify on the record. “I felt [they] were very much genre pieces that were exploiting the issue,” she says. Also in Los Angeles, Grupo de Teatro SINERGIA recently announced that it would extend its run of Ruben Amavizca’s play “The Women of Juarez” at the Frida Kahlo Theater through mid-September.

In Mexico, the song “Las Mujeres de Juarez” (The Women of Juarez) by the veteran norteno group Los Tigres del Norte sparked complaints by both state authorities and victims’ families when it was released earlier this year, and a controversial TV docudrama series, “Tan Infinito Como el Desierto” (As Infinite as the Desert), ran in July on the national Azteca network.

Most Mexican accounts of these controversies so far have been limited to short newspaper items. But the debate may sharpen in the months ahead, especially as more U.S. artists and media outlets grapple with the subject. Abaunza says artistic interest in Juarez began to reach critical mass in 2003, around the much-publicized 10th anniversary of the first murders. And in February of that year, the body of another victim was found: a 7-year-old girl whose eyes had been gouged out. “That news is the straw that broke the camel’s back, with regard to the artistic community in particular,” Abaunza says.

Some of the first artists to arrive on the Juarez scene aren’t happy about all the newcomers. “I know that there’s many films [in Hollywood] in development. It’s such a sensational thing that they just jump on it like vultures,” says Lourdes Portillo, the Mexican American filmmaker whose 2001 documentary, “Senorita Extraviada” (Missing Young Woman), helped bring global attention to the killings. In making her film, Portillo says she was careful to obtain permission from family members before using victims’ names and stories. “I think the mothers of these girls own their stories,” she says, speaking by phone from Los Angeles. “And I think everybody thinks it’s there for the taking. It’s not there for the taking.”

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New ways to express

Sometimes a subject is so painful and bleak that art hesitates to approach it. But once it does, the results can be groundbreaking. Goya practically had to reinvent printmaking to convey the graphic brutality of Napoleon’s campaign against Spain in his “Disasters of War” series of etchings. Art Spiegelman revolutionized the comic book form with “Maus,” his anthropomorphic meditation on the Holocaust.

A few of the artists working on Juarez-related projects are looking for innovative ways to address the killings from a nuanced, informed perspective while avoiding slasher-movie cliches and pulp-fiction conventions. Among the more unusual and anticipated works is a book being put together by actress Mia Kirshner (of Showtime’s “The L Word”) that will combine writings, photographs and other personal contributions from members of Juarez victims’ families with text and illustrations reminiscent of the style of a graphic novel. The book will be issued in 2006 and also will include chapters on female refugees in the Russian republic of Ingushetia and along the Thailand-Myanmar border.

Kirshner says she has spent three years planning and researching the book. The granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, she wanted it to convey the reflections and viewpoints of the people most directly affected by the hardships it chronicles.

“This book is not supposed to be this grand manifesto on the stage of humanitarian affairs,” says Kirshner, who received a small grant from Amnesty International and is financing the rest of the project out of her own pocket. “It very much will be like you’re looking into someone’s diary.... There will be nothing professional-looking about this book. It will be like looking into something very precious.”

Artist Phoebe Gloeckner, who traveled with Kirshner to Ciudad Juarez last fall, says the book will avoid a linear narrative and attempt to relate “this kind of disjointed tale of confusion and horror and loss.” Though she admired Portillo’s documentary, Gloeckner says, in film “the pictures go by very fast. With a book you can linger over things, you can make connections to things so you have many more opportunities to build levels of meaning ... because you know the reader will be able to flip the pages back and forth and try to make sense of the story themselves.”

Gloeckner says she was attracted to the project primarily for artistic reasons. “I would never say I’m doing it to bring attention to something, because then it smacks of propaganda. I think the danger in art trying to craft a message is that it’s often going to fall flat as a piece of art. On the other hand, stepping back, I do want [the killings] to stop.”

Others are more outspoken in hoping their projects may in some way help to resolve the murders. “I think it’s a playground for killers of all types -- serial, domestic, any you care to mention, they’re all down there,” says Dobson, writer-director of “The Virgin of Juarez.” “It’s a perfect storm for evil, and my personal belief is that if you shine a light on evil it creeps back into its corner.”

Dobson says he first became aware of the crimes in Mexico while researching a subject that had haunted his childhood in England: the so-called “Moors murders” committed by a boyfriend-and-girlfriend team of serial child killers in the 1960s. “When I was a child, it was the stuff that nightmares were made of. And then when I read about the Juarez situation, it just re-awoke all those demons and kept them alive.”

In the movie, Talancon plays a young woman who, after being attacked and apparently left for dead, begins having visions and develops stigmata. Dobson says the premise that inspired the film’s fictional title character is: “What if Joan of Arc had been born in Juarez?”

Driver, who does volunteer work for the relief agency Oxfam International, believes the victims and their families “need help from people who can shout slightly louder.” In the movie she plays a Los Angeles journalist investigating the killings. “There’s no Hollywood happy ending in this [movie]. It would be obscene and ridiculous if there was, because it’s still going on.”

Victoria Caraveo Vallina, who as director of the Chihuahua Women’s Institute works with mothers of the Juarez victims, says she has noticed a tendency toward sensationalism in Juarez-related creative projects. Today, she says, too many artists are stringing together “little pieces” of anecdotes and hearsay, and “they do not verify the real information ... and I think that is affecting the cause.”

Caraveo Vallina is especially critical of the 10 1/2 -hour TV Azteca series, which dramatizes some of the most gruesome theories put forward by police and the media. One episode dealt with the possibility that women were being killed to make pornographic “snuff” films. Another depicted a copycat killing.

Genoveva Martinez, the series’ executive producer, says the show’s development team wanted to “create awareness” of the Juarez situation, which she says is difficult in a country where few people read newspapers. Television docudramas, she believes, can help fill the informational void. Research for the series, she says, was based on interviews with legal authorities, journalistic reports on the killings and information culled from Internet sites, including some belonging to organizations that support victims’ relatives, though no relatives were interviewed directly by Azteca staff.

Caraveo Vallina says that when TV producers or filmmakers stray from the hard facts into conjecture, they collapse individual women’s lives into generic composites and reduce the complexities of their stories to melodrama. This in turn feeds popular misperceptions. For example, she says, while it is widely believed that nearly all the victims worked in maquiladoras, many in fact did not. A study commissioned by her institute also found that the motives behind the killings varied widely, from narco-trafficking and gang-related violence to sexual crimes and domestic disputes. “This is not a novel, this is not ‘Twilight Zone,’ ” Caraveo Vallina says. “This is reality. Real life, real girls with lives, with dreams, girls who wanted to help the families, the mothers, to have their own families, to get married. And the families are fed up, just fed up.”

Julia Caldera Chavez, whose 16-year-old daughter, Maria Elena Chavez Caldera, disappeared four years ago, says that for some mothers, seeing the Juarez killings re-created on TV is like experiencing them all over again. Nevertheless, she believes these kinds of pop-culture treatments can help people to learn about the “tragedies that we live and the pain that we suffer from losing our daughters.”

With no end to the killings in sight, the projects, and the questions, are likely to keep coming. “I don’t think artists should shy away from the issue,” says Amnesty International’s Abaunza. “I think they should be respectful of the pain of the mothers and the true tragedy of the situation and not trivialize it.”

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Times researcher Cecilia Sanchez in Mexico City contributed to this report.