Documentary noir in the city of fear: Feminicide,impunity and grassroots communication in Ciudad Juarez

Introduction

At the turn of the 21st century, the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez gained notoriety in the international media as a place tormented by fear and violence. Since 2006, the year Mexican president-elect Felipe Calderon launched his ill-fated “Drug War”, the city’s soaring murder rate has captured news headlines around the world. Between 2006 and 2012, an estimated 50,000 people have been murdered and thousands more have disappeared. With the city’s increasing militarization, its murder rate spiked and so did the state of impunity. Today, a murderer can take comfort in the knowledge that they will almost surely get away with their crime. The scale of grisly violence has prompted journalists, scholars and filmmakers to reflect on the political context of the crimes. Many attempts to understand the violence have been sensational and derivative. But others have raised essential questions such as: what role does impunity play? What does the violence have to do with the neoliberal reorganization of the borderlands in the context of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)? What about the militarization of the border that closely followed in NAFTA’s wake?

Prior to Juarez’s designation as one of the world’s most violent cities (Fregoso, 2012), journalists, scholars and filmmakers turned their attention to the gendered dimension of the violence, asking how it came to be that post-NAFTA Juarez became an especially dangerous place to be female. From the early 1990s onwards homicidal attacks on women and girls spiraled while the state refused to address the crimes. Propelled by a growing social movement seeking to publicize and investigate the crimes, by the late 1990s, documentary filmmakers started to bring worldwide attention to the story of the missing and murdered women and girls of Juarez. A number of filmmakers began playing a vital role in investigating the crimes and raising public awareness of the violence stalking the women of Juarez. The numerous documentary interventions into this space of extreme gender violence and impunity did not resolve the crimes, but they have been instrumental in politicizing the murders.

In this paper, I discuss grassroots efforts to investigate and circulate news and analysis about the Juarez murders. I focus on the role of documentary practice in this context of hyper-devolution – a signal characteristic of neoliberal rationality – of responsibility for public safety. With its female-labour driven low-wage manufacturing, its large and profitable criminal economy and its hyper-privatized approach to urban development, Juarez is, in many respects, a neoliberal test case. In this context of intense deregulation and ballooning socioeconomic inequality, much of the investigation of the violence is performed not by the authorities but by those advocating on behalf of the victims and by the media makers who attempt to document and publicize the story. These grassroots civil society investigations have been highly effective in politicizing the crimes, posing a counter to the dominant state and corporate (media and manufacturing) narratives of individualization and responsibilization, which aim to deflect a systemic critique of the crimes onto the victims and their families.

My approach to exploring this politics of individualization and responsibilization is inspired by the arguments elaborated by Gabe Mythen and Sandra Walklate (2006) in this journal. In their analysis of the politics of fear and the crisis of public security in the context of the global “war on terror”, Mythen and Walklate argue that states increasingly resort to a discourse of individual responsibilization. In their analysis of government publicity materials, designed to encourage citizen vigilance to combat terrorism, Mythen and Walklate find the neoliberal state is effectively abandoning claims to protect the public from harm by displacing responsibility on to the same public to remain alert to “what you can do” about crime, terrorist threats and so on. The authors show how states’ growing emphasis on discourses of individualization and responsibilization bring the neoliberal logic of devolution to the realm of public safety. Since they have proven unable to solve the problem of crime, states resort to a strategy of controlling crime. And a discourse of personal responsibility, for Mythen and Walklate, is central to a discernible shift towards emphasizing each individual’s need to develop private strategies of self-protection. This shift is symptomatic of the wider neoliberal context where devolution of public resources to ever-smaller scales dominates state policy. Amid the soaring violence and impunity in Juarez over the last two decades, a discourse of responsibilization and individualization fills the pronouncements of public officials. It is another instance in which the neoliberal state is at once preoccupied with security while it is increasingly disinclined to secure it.

In the context of Juarez, one of the implications of the neoliberal state’s repudiation of such responsibility is that much of the critical work of investigating the murders of women and girls has been de facto delegated to activists, journalists and filmmakers. Documentary filmmakers have been instrumental in the domestic and global circulation of the story, taking it beyond the realm of investigation and exposé and into the domain of global grassroots communication. Such practices have played a vital role in the growth and global profile of one of the most important social movements to emerge in northern Mexico in the last three decades. The aesthetic strategies and subjective stance of many of the documentaries about the feminicide also contribute to broadening the debate about victimology and the role culture – and media activism – plays in the expression, valorization and circulation of public grief (Rentschler, 2011). Through this paper, I hope to contribute an additional approach to the analysis on the neoliberal politics of responsibilization in contexts of systemic fear. To this end, I focus my discussion on documentary investigation as a mode of grassroots communication that aims to disrupt the logic of responsibilization and individualization amid the ongoing gender violence in Juarez. In order to work through these themes I pay particular attention to Lourdes Portillo’s documentary on the murders, Senorita Extraviada (Missing Young Woman) (2001). Among the many films on the feminicide, Portillo’s documentary has been the most influential and widely circulated treatment of the crimes. The film’s aesthetic strategy materializes the problem of representation and the crisis of interpretation that drives the confusing and derivative narratives of the feminicide at the hands of state officials and the dominant commercial media. My focus on the vital interpretation that cinema can bring to the crimes coincides with Nicole Rafter and Michelle Brown’s (2011) contention that film draws out the emotive intensity, subjective experience and multi-dimensionality of a crime story that traditional academic criminological literature cannot convey. Methodologically, my discussion draws on the critical cultural studies tradition, which seeks to explore the intersection of cultural texts, socio-political context and lived experience (Saukko, 2003). Hence my interpretive approach to the text focuses on the interconnections between key official and oppositional discourses associated with Juarez’s feminicide, the ways in which the crimes have coincided with a dramatic turn towards neoliberal development in Mexico and the export-oriented border region in particular, and what the film reveals about the lived experience of gender violence on the border.

Documenting feminicide in the city of numbers

Over the last two decades, hundreds of women and girls have been murdered and disappeared in Juarez. Raped, mutilated, strangled, stabbed, burned and tortured, the ravaged bodies of the mostly young, predominantly poor victims have formed a pattern of gender terror on a scale that, their families and women’s groups argue, amount to a “war on women” (SOS Initiative, 2001). As I mentioned in the introduction, a pattern to the murders is identified to have begun in 1993 when the discarded body of the first victim was discovered in a quiet, middle-class neighbourhood. Who is killing the women of Juarez? Is it a serial killer, or several? Is it the police or the paramilitaries? Porn or snuff filmmakers? Organ traffickers? A satanic cult? The “Juniors” (sons of the elite)? The narcotraficantes? Men lashing out against poverty? Men threatened by the shifting gender relations? Rumours, theories and speculations on the profile and motives of perpetrators abound. But two decades following the discovery of a pattern, and despite the fact that the murders have been assigned to over ten government agencies and at least nine reports have been produced by Mexican and international investigators (Pineda Jaimes, 2006), officials have yet to produce any credible explanation for the crimes. The police have been widely criticized by local and international human rights groups for routinely covering up information, misplacing and falsifying evidence, manipulation of crime scenes, intimidation of witnesses and torture of suspects (Amnesty International, 2003; Fregoso, 2003). Women’s rights activists and the families of the victims have denounced the police’s sporadic, media-friendly arrests as mere political theatre. Well before Calderon’s declaration of war on the drug cartels gave Juarez its reputation as a place of rampant criminal violence and impunity, it had come to be known in the Mexican and international media as the “capital of murdered women” and “the city of fear”.

Feminists, human rights advocates and families of the murdered and missing women describe the murders in systemic terms: as a feminicide. For the justice movement that has grown up around the murders, the charge of feminicide is an important discursive strategy to transform the unspeakable violence and private anguish into a public matter. The charge of feminicide, a juridical term for gendered genocide, is a way of politicizing the murders, making the excessive violence at once public and globally significant through mobilizing the language of international law and by highlighting the intersection between private violence and public terror (Schmidt Camacho, 2010). Activists use this terminology to represent the violence as constitutive of a systemic effort to deny a whole category of women – predominantly poor, racialized and migrant – their basic rights of personal safety and free mobility (Monarrez Fragoso, 2000). “One way to politicize violence against a class of women”, media scholar Rosalinda Fregoso argues, “is to redefine it not as isolated or personal in nature, but as a weapon of war, a tool of political repression sanctioned by an undemocratic and repressive regime, in its war against poor and indigenous communities” (Fregoso, 2000: 143-44). For the movement, the term feminicide opens up the space of silence created by the authorities, the perpetrators and those commercial agents of representation that exploit this pervasive fear.

In an essay on the citizenship of fear in neoliberalizing Latin America, Susana Rotker (2002) points to the dizzying presence of numbers in commercial media and state security narratives. Through their decontextualized repetition, she argues, the numbers “do nothing but accumulate”. For the news media and other realist genres such as documentary, numbers may narrate an entry point into a story. But the social meaning of the numbers quickly erodes through constant repetition. In the context of Juarez’s feminicide, the problem of representation is starkly reflected in the public battles over numbers, which seemed to peak at the turn of the century when murders, disappearances, as well as public agitation about the violence, became increasingly acute. Activists, journalists and human rights groups were coming up with substantially higher numbers than the government figures. For example, El Paso Times journalist Diana Washington Valdez (2005) says her research shows 320 victims between 1993 and June 2002. In the spring of 2001, six months prior to the November 2001 discovery of eight women’s bodies in a lot across from the Maquiladora Association office in Juarez, a number of groups, including the Grupo 8 de Marzo, Comite Independiente de Chihuahua and the Taller de Genero de la Universidad Autonoma de Juarez, delivered a report entitled “Cases of Murdered Women in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua” to the UN special rapporteur for Human Rights, Dato Param Cumaraswamy. That report listed 189 women murdered between January 1993 and April 2001. By early 2002, the number had risen to 289 murdered and 450 disappeared (Fregoso, 2003). A year later, figures presented in Amnesty International’s major report “Intolerable Killings” (2003) document 370 women murdered. Since 2006, the numbers have again risen sharply. According to the Juarez-based advocacy group Nuestras Hijas de Regreso, disappearances have increased by 400 percent from 2008 to the present (González Rodriguez, 2012). Since these numbers started to make headlines in Mexico and internationally in the early 2000s, the Mexican authorities have vociferously put forth drastically lower numbers – citing estimates of around 70 – an incongruous discrepancy noted in Amnesty’s report.

These numbers tell a story of gender violence, but the discrepancies also narrate the connection of the violence to battles over representation. For the political and commercial classes determined to protect the image of the city, the numbers are a matter of strategic deliberation over definitions of what constitutes rape and the definition of a disappearance. The commercial media cast doubt on the charges of systemic violence by speculating on the victims’ backgrounds, habits and circumstances. Media theorist Rita González (2003) argues that the media’s salacious and gruesome representations of the murders contribute to a climate of fear in the city while they repeatedly violate the women after their death. It is the victims’ status as poor, dark women, critics charge, that renders them not only “disposable” to the perpetrators in life but again and again in their representation in death. “Given the sensationalist tendencies of journalistic accounts of the border,” González argues, “and the unique and complex identity of Juarez as both city of the future and region of uneven development, the task of depicting its recent history of violence demands an uncompromising, intelligent, culturally aware and fearless approach” (González, 2003: 235). Nonetheless, government officials have countered demands for action with accusations that the women themselves are responsible for their terrible fate and activists are labelled as “enemies of modernity” for undermining Juarez’s global image ¹ (Schmidt Camacho, 2010). This strategy of deflection pivots on the familiar demonizing trope of the “vagrant” woman, moving freely, publicly and therefore dangerously through the city in flagrant disregard for its devouring reproach (Schmidt Camacho, 2010). In the state’s patriarchal narrative, the safe woman is the virtuous woman who remains under the cover of the home, a place which is constructed as the only secure place for a woman in a rapidly growing city.

Through its discourse of vagrancy against virtue, the state has attempted to link deviant sexuality to women’s transgressive presence in public spaces (Schmidt Camacho, 2010; Tabuenca Cordoba, 2003). As border scholar Maria Socorro Tabuenca Cordoba (2003) argues, the discourse of virtue that organizes the state’s representation of the feminicide is a strategy to control women’s movement in the highly mobile space of the border region at the same time that neoliberal restructuring reorganizes women’s relationship to public and private spheres of production. One significant expression of this strategy of immobilization and control is in the state’s personal safety campaigns that are directed at women via radio broadcasts. The announcements target behaviour in public, urging women to avoid wearing high heels and make-up and going out in the street, especially at night. The effect of these campaigns is reflected in women’s expression of everyday fear in Juarez: fear of men, of going out at night by themselves, and fear of waiting for the bus that takes them to the maquilas ² (Landau and Angulo, 2000).

In the face of the state’s refusal to investigate the crimes, social organizations and documentary filmmakers have taken on the role of conducting forensic explorations of this story. The anti-feminicide movement adopted a strategy of global diffusion and a number of documentaries have played an instrumental role in drawing widespread domestic and international attention to the story. For example, Ursula Biemann’s documentary essay Performing the Border (1999) draws links between the global factory system embodied in the maquiladoras, in which some of the victims worked, and changing gender dynamics in an urban industrial economy that is intensely dependent upon female labour. Biemann’s emphasis on neoliberal globalization is a thread also taken up in Maquila: A Tale of Two Mexicos (Landau and Angulo, 2000), which considers the feminicide in relation to the socioeconomic changes wrought by NAFTA. Other titles such as On the Edge (Hise, 2006), Juarez: the city where women are disposable (Flores and Vassolo, 2007) and Border Echoes (Mendez-Quiroga, 2007) aim to unravel the mystery of the murders through an exploration of the legal, social, economic and political dynamics of the border. All of these investigations provide insightful analyses of the crimes, but for the remainder of this paper I am going to focus my discussion on the documentary evidence provided by one of the most widely circulated and accessible investigations: Lourdes Portillo’s Señorita Extraviada (Missing Young Woman) (2001). Portillo, who describes her film as a “documentary noir”, provides a devastating systemic critique of the feminicide. While most of the documentaries mentioned above focus a great deal on the relationship of the growth of the maquiladora economy to the murders, Señorita explores a multitude of possible explanations while Portillo pivots her inquiry around the question of institutionalized impunity. This approach allows for an interrogation of how attention to the politics of documentary evidence can reveal otherwise hidden mystifications that flourish in a context of rampant impunity.

To begin to bring some lucidity to the terrifying confusion that surrounds the murders, we need to listen to the expert testimony of the victims, their loved ones and their advocates. This is what Portillo sets out to do in Señorita. Amid the swelling representations of the feminicide, Señorita is exemplary in its portrayal of the murders from the standpoint of the protagonists of the story: the victims, their loved ones, women living in Juarez’s colonias (shantytowns), and the feminist activists who have been working to contextualize the numbers and memorialize the dead and disappeared. Portillo’s camera is explicitly pointed at investigating the murders politically through her search for the story’s underlying plot. The film grapples with the ways the gendered terror stalking Juarez functions politically in a climate of institutional impunity, pervading every aspect of city life – from the transnational corporation to the local police station. Hence, the entire film is structured around privileging the direct voice of historical knowledge of those experiencing, and struggling against, the full force of the violence. With the exception of these voices, Portillo recounts, “I find myself distrusting everything I’m told and everything I read” (Portillo, 2001). With one eye firmly trained on the complicity of the powerful, Señorita grapples with social, economic and political insecurity in Juarez, and its relationship to the climate of fear and suspicion where few dare to talk openly about the violence.

The politics and poetics of evidence

In the opening sequence of Señorita, Portillo recounts that when she arrived in Juarez to investigate the murders, “the most significant thing was the silence.” How, she wonders, does a filmmaker represent silence? “I came to Juarez to track down ghosts,” Portillo continues in a voiceover as her camera pans across the parched, sprawling border landscape. Her utterances introduce us to images of the place where hundreds of “young, poor, brown, unprotected women” have been murdered over the past decade. Juarez emerges out of the desert sand as a city of frenetic movement, and through a rapid succession of seemingly disjointed images Portillo begins weaving the official and unofficial investigations of the case, comparing the evidence, both material and discursive, and linking the murders with the specificity of the material context. Through the use of culled television footage and archival material, interviews and reconstructions, a counter-narrative of the murders and disappearances emerges and a devastating chain of culpability is considered, linking powerful criminal networks, the police, the maquila system, and officials’ refusal to act. By entering into and opening up the space of fear-fueled silence and interrogating the general climate of insecurity that shrouds the story, Señorita recognizes that the “murderer” is more systemic than the sensational serial killer narratives favored by the tabloid media allow.©

Portillo’s rendition of the case also implicitly levels a critique at the conventional criminological epistemologies – staples of the documentary tradition – and this critique occupies the centre of the film’s treatment of the politics of fear in Juarez. Alison Young’s writing on crime and film aesthetics provides helpful insight into Portillo’s strategy. “The documentary form,” Young argues, “has been conventionally associated with truth-telling and factuality” (Young, 2010: 108). In the established genre of crime documentary, she shows, the strategy of truth typically relies on the authority of the law and the claims of those authorities responsible for investigating crimes in a particular jurisdiction. As Portillo’s film and other documentary treatments of the feminicide show, this convention presents unique problems in a context such as Juarez where rampant impunity casts a shadow over the whole system of institutional justice. How, then, is a filmmaker to achieve the necessary “documentary veracity” (Young, 2010: 111) when the search for evidence-driven truth is submerged in a context of such intense fear and intractable impunity that the perpetrators take on a spectral quality? As Young points out, mainstream cinema about violent crime typically works towards a resolution of some kind, which in turn affirms the viability of the criminal justice system. Sooner or later the perpetrator is caught, killed or tried, and the crime is matched with a corresponding response from the criminal justice system. Yet as the horrifying narrative of the feminicide unfolds in Señorita, it becomes clear that, under the present institutional circumstances, no such resolution can be forthcoming. As the traditional crime documentary promise to make a crime scene intelligible goes unmet, the filmmaker must pursue an alternative aesthetic strategy of meaning-making.

In reflecting on the challenges of making Señorita in this excessively confusing and dangerous context, Portillo testifies to having to develop an alternative strategy for establishing a narrative of investigation out of the tumult of fragmented visible evidence: “When I decided to make a documentary about the [feminicide], I went to Juarez and found a deafening wall of silence: most people were too terrorized to speak out. The authorities, when questioned, gave only cavalier and confused responses. There was no way to make a documentary in which any approximation to journalistic objectivity could be claimed” (Portillo, 2003: 229). But even armed with the narrative openness made possible by the filmmaker’s abandonment of conventional evidentiary claims to objectivity, the obfuscation that surrounds the feminicide still requires disentangling the dense knot of untruths that envelop the social context of the violence. Here we find Portillo’s distinct practice of a cinema of ambiguity – her version of Third Cinema pioneer Julio Garcia Espinosa’s “imperfect cinema” – at its most daring and effective. Through her inconclusive approach, Portillo abandons the conventional strategies of the realist documentary, and in particular the dubious realism of the crime investigation genre, while maintaining a stance of stark realism. To achieve this, she privileges the perspective of the victims, their families and the activists whose experience, agitation and advocacy make them producers of the most reliable knowledge.

Yet Señorita does not entirely dispense with the crime documentary’s investigative mode. Rather, I would argue that its typical strategies of deduction are employed to weave together essential aspects of the background context in order to highlight the problem of representation. Through her depiction and assessment of high-profile arrests, Portillo shows that we cannot grasp the truth simply by having it shown to us. And her depiction of a parade of false arrests of possible murder suspects throughout the film is intensely unsettling. The authorities’ eagerness to pin the crimes on an appropriately unsavory suspect or group of suspects so as to not disrupt the status quo is one of the only lucid truths to emerge from the state’s fraught, highly politicized investigation. This challenges the viewer to reconsider the conventional documentary treatment of causality, criminality and punishment as matters of identifying and corralling individual pathologies. Furthermore, it contests the state’s own narrative of responsibilization, as it is identified by Mythen and Walklate (2006), which seeks to turn responsibility for insecurity over to its victims while deflecting attention away from the state’s unwillingness to address the ghastly crimes.

Early on in Señorita, Portillo effectively interrogates this strategy with an image dialectic that juxtaposes her original footage with culled television news footage depicting the tone of the official investigation. In one rendering, Francisco, Barrio, governor of the state of Chihuahua (1992–98) is explaining that the authorities have found a pattern in the murders: the victims, he states, have been frequenting night clubs and keeping company with gang members. In another scene, the state’s attorney-general, Jorge Lopez, appears in a television interview enthusiastically tabling his office’s idea of imposing a citywide curfew to address the violence. He backs up his plan by reiterating that this will not pose any problems for the “good girls” who should be at home with their families. The “bad girls,” he proposes, can then be left to their own devices along with the rest of the city’s villainous characters. When his interviewer points out that the fuel of Juarez’s industrial economy – the 24-hour maquila industry that pulls many women into and out of industrial parks at all hours – requires a highly mobile labour force, which also happens to be largely female, Lopez concedes, “well, you can’t impose this on workers.” Señorita then cuts to an interview with a human rights activist who points out that immediately following public pronouncements from officials blaming the victims for being out at night and for dressing provocatively, the number of murders of women always rises. By taking these officials’ confident victim-blaming discourses out of the established media frame and placing them within an oppositional narrative, Portillo highlights the problem of interpretation by pointing to the culpability of the political class.

Next Señorita embarks on an investigation into the highly public arrests and imprisonment of suspects in 1995, 1996, 1999 and 2001. The film uses interviews with the suspects’ lawyers, human rights advocates and archival footage of their testimonies to problematize the intersection of individual culpability and the opaque function of evidence in a context of institutional impunity. With her introduction of footage of, and about, the accused, Portillo inserts another layer of ambiguity into her investigation: the visual evidence about the accused that she presents only confirms the impossibility of a conventional documentary resolution to the crimes: that the crime will be matched with a response from the criminal justice system (Young, 2010). Rather, the sequence makes clear that the criminal justice infrastructure – inclusive of the media, the government, the judiciary and the police – is incapable of delivering justice. With this move, another question is added to the terrifying incomprehensibility of the crimes, which is raised by the feminist scholar of violence Rita Segato (2010): is the feminicide a symptom of impunity, as it is traditionally understood to be? Or are these hyper-violent public murders instrumental to the creation of a climate of impunity?

Introducing the suspects

At the outset, Señorita launches into an interrogation of the sensational arrest of the feminicide’s first suspect: a wealthy Egyptian chemist who was working for a US-owned maquiladora when he was charged with murder in 1995. Abel Latif Sharif Sharif, already in possession of a criminal record for rape and assault in the US, was the first of a number of dubious characters to be charged with the murders. Given his record, his wealth, his belligerent personal style and his Otherness in the eyes of the media and authorities, Sharif provided an ideal suspect. Through interviews with his lawyer and careful examination of television footage, a complex image of “Juarez’s favourite scapegoat” (Gaspar de Alba, 2003: 7) unfolds. Portillo shows the tremendous effort that the authorities expended in order to attribute all of the murders to Sharif despite the conflicting evidence. She unpacks how, with the help of the commercial media, the most incongruous official theories can convince a frightened public. We learn that by the time Sharif moved to Juarez in 1994, twelve bodies had already been discovered. Six months after his detention, when bodies continued to appear, police claimed he was orchestrating the murders from prison.

Following this lead, Señorita takes us through the arrest of a group of teenaged drug runners from the Los Rebeldes gang, who the police claimed Sharif was paying 1,200 dollars for each victim. The charges were dropped when journalists uncovered evidence that the teenagers were beaten into confessing, and all but the only adult member of the group were released. Portillo then traces another lead that emerged in 1999 with the arrest of a gang of drug-addicted bus drivers called Los Choferes, who transported women to and from the shantytowns and the maquiladoras. They were arrested after a 13-year-old girl who survived a gang rape pressed charges against a bus driver. The drivers claimed they were tortured into confessing. Here, Señorita splices in a chilling scene from a television interview with one of the suspects, where he urges parents to protect their daughters because the killers are still loose. Eventually all but one of the drivers, identified by the girl as an attacker, were released after pictures of them showing signs of torture appeared in the press. These investigations expose an important counter-narrative to the government’s theatrical attempts to resolve the crimes by attributing them to characters whose alleged criminality is framed by their marginal social status.

After this standard crime investigation narrative fails to illuminate who may be behind the murders, Señorita turns our attention to the political aesthetics of investigation. In so doing, the film privileges the only voices Portillo found whom she could trust: the families and friends of the disappeared and those active in the anti-feminicide movement. This aesthetic strategy reveals a social infrastructure of grassroots investigation, interpretation and agitation, which managed to draw global attention to a struggle for truth and justice that had been heretofore marginalized, ignored and maligned by the authorities. While Señorita draws on these protest aesthetics to investigate the murders, the film itself has played a pivotal role in this public strategy of “political witness” (Kane, 2012: 71) in order to force an official response. In the sections that follow, I explore Señorita’s use of the symbolic to investigate the murders from the point of view of the victims. I then move to a discussion of how this exploration provokes the film to turn towards an interrogation of the material conditions of impunity on the border.

The cross and the photo: Symbolism as social investigation

In problematizing the fraught investigations and evidentiary claims of the state, Señorita uses allegorical strategies of representation to elaborate a difficult counter-narrative. Images of the desert where hundreds of bodies have been discovered are layered with images of a woman’s profile, a single abandoned shoe, young girls looking in shop windows, girls working in stores, girls walking through a nameless shantytown; buses driving through the desert, dropping women off at the maquiladora; search parties scouring a barren desert, and women painting black crosses on pink backgrounds on street poles. Here, the documentary audience witnesses the importance that non-literal forms of representation play in Juarez’s anti-feminicide movement (Fregoso, 2003). In a context where the display of mutilated female bodies is a staple of press coverage of the crimes, allegory is a strategy to counter the violence of the dominant symbolic environment whose sensational representation of the murders works to quell oppositional voices through the mediation of fear (Fregoso, 2003).

The black cross on a pink background, one of the key symbols of Juarez’s anti-feminicide movement, is a central trope used in the film, marking both Señorita’s deliberate connection with the movement and its interrogation of the problem of representation. The crosses started appearing in Juarez in May 1999 as part of a campaign of visibility launched by a group of women calling itself Voces Sin Eco (Voices without Echo). For several years, its members gathered at weekends to paint crosses around the city to register their protest (Fregoso, 2003). The crosses are oppositional and affective symbols of public anguish butting up against the wall of official denial about the devastating impact of the violence. Fregoso reflects on the symbolic weight of crosses in light of the colonial history that they evoke, arguing that in the hands of the movement the crosses represent a symbolic appropriation: “The ghostly barren black crosses on pink backgrounds, painstakingly emblazoned around Ciudad Juarez as abrasions in public discourse, as embodiments less of Christ, the man made flesh, but of female flesh made human sacrifice” (Fregoso, 2000: 151). In evoking mass death, their insistent repetition signals the constant violation that occurs with the tabloid press’s habit of publishing lurid photos of mutilated victims. “Faced with such literalness and explicitness, religiosity is a mode for re-imagining the murdered, violated body otherwise: as a subject undeserving of annihilation” (Fregoso, 2003: 22). As an appropriated symbol, the crosses themselves provide a vector for the movement’s grassroots communication practice. As a stark visual testimony, they bring people together symbolically as well as physically, providing a way of overcoming the atomizing effects of mass-mediated culture’s lonely spectatorship. The use of the cross is also a counter-discourse of representation that brings a secret out into the public, through a visual discourse of loss that seeks to make visible that which is unspeakable and unrepresentable. This public voicing of the unspeakable has been crucial, argues border scholar Alicia Schmidt Camacho (2010), to disrupt the systematic devalorization of the dead and missing as part of the inevitable cost of neoliberal development. The cross henceforth acts as a medium for the symbolic appropriation of public space to mourn the dead and also to articulate the indispensable public role of women in a city propelled by female labour, who, by its actions, the state considers expendable (Fregoso, 2003).

Photographs also play an important role in Señorita. Portillo uses the photo – an important device in much of her work (McBane, 2001) – to invoke the centrality of memory in the victims’ loved ones’ struggle for clarity and justice. Photos of the victims, full of life, are interspersed throughout Señorita, appearing in sharp contrast to the violence of the commercial media’s portrayal of the women as anonymous, ravaged corpses. Señorita’s careful and sensitive use of photos of the victims implicitly engages urgent debates about the ethics and politics of documentary aesthetics (see Carrabine, 2012) as well as the image-intensive narrative of Juarez’s feminicide, whereby victims are routinely presented in the tabloid media as lurid warnings about the dangers of the city. Taken for identification cards, quinceañera celebrations and treasured family portraits, the spectral images act as punctuation marks, signaling narrative transitions and humanizing the subject. They pull the documentary’s witness into a space of identification through their unsettling everydayness and their emotional intimacy, set against the backdrop of the knowledge of their subject’s death.

I read in this image dialectic an affinity with John Berger’s conception of the two distinct uses of photography: the public and the private. The private photo, he proposes, despite its stillness, continues to be surrounded in its intimate context, thus making it a memento of a life lived. Conversely, the public photo is “a seized set of appearances, which has nothing to do with us, its readers or with the original meaning of the event. It offers information, but information severed from all lived experience” (Berger, 1991: 56). By cleaving the social embedded in the image in this way, Berger offers not only an insightful feminist critique through which to consider Señorita’s use of quotidian family photos. But his conception of the public and the private could also be considered as corresponding to a vital distinction between information and communication. While information is associated with objectivity and evidence, communication relates to the affective and to social relationships.

Spaces of impunity: The maquila and the police

The communicative impact of the photos comes into sharp relief in Señorita’s interrogation of two institutions at the centre of the story: the maquila industry and the police. First, by drawing on a collection of photos of a young maquiladora worker named Sagrario González, who disappeared after leaving work, the film considers an alarming theory of the industry’s direct role, itself tied to the use of photos. González’s grief-stricken mother explains to Portillo’s camera that someone at the maquiladora had changed her schedule on that day. Her daughter left the factory without the protection of her family and vanished. Several of the reproduced images of González were taken while she was at work at the maquiladora. Having women workers pose for photos, especially on Friday paydays, is a common industry practice, human rights activist Judith Galarza reports in the film. “I believe they choose them from the photos,” Galarza charges, adding that the authorities are uninterested in seriously investigating this thread because of the strategic economic role of the multi-billion dollar industry. “The maquilas are untouchable, nothing is investigated,” Galarza insists.

By casting the photos as material evidence in a crime scene investigation, which appear alongside the testimonies of González’s family and other activists, Portillo interrogates the contradictory situation of poor women’s inclusion as economic actors, as magnets for global capital, and their social exclusion from any formal system of justice or representation in the hyper-neoliberalized space of the border. This differential inclusion in the globalized system of production and representation is highly dependent upon the industry’s control of its image. As Melissa Wright argues, the maquila industry’s harnessing of representation and articulation of the feminicide connects directly to the way the devaluation of women on the border as inputs in the global assembly line also creates value: “Any activity that contests the normalization of the crimes and challenges the devaluation of the victims,” Wright argues, “threatens the value that is supported by such processes” (Wright, 2005: 379). Señorita directly entered the debate in 2003, as international attention on Juarez’s feminicide was peaking, when two plant managers tried to block a public screening organized by activists (Wright, 2004).

Photos are also prominent in Señorita’s investigation of connections between impunity and the direct participation of the police. This thread is examined through the testimony of a survivor named Maria Talamatez. The photos that figure prominently in this narrative are not, however, made visible. Rather, their significance is explained as part of Talamatez’s agonizing description of her gang rape at a police station. During her captivity, she explains, the police officers attacking her used photos depicting women being murdered in order to terrorize her into silence.

Talamatez’s story not only points to evidence of the possible culpability of the police, but it also elucidates the way in which impunity amplifies the circulation of fear. As Schmidt Camacho (2010) explains, we ought to think about impunity as a function of state terror. Contrary to the influential ideas that police criminality or criminal complicity are an unfortunate symptom in the growing pains of neoliberal development, or the regrettable result of illicit cultures of border cities such as Juarez, Schmidt Camacho argues that the state and transnational industry not only tolerate but also exploit public fears of the police as a generalized strategy of social discipline. “While international observers commonly represent the gender violence in Juarez as a regressive cultural manifestation of masculine aggression,” she contends, “it is perhaps better understood as a rational expression of the contradictions arising from the gendered codes of neoliberal governance and development” (Schmidt Camacho, 2010: 279).

Talamatez’s testimony provides the basis for Señorita’s interrogation of the role of the state in producing a permanent, if undeclared, state of emergency in the context of its neoliberal strategy, grounding Fregoso’s contention that “Mexico’s neoliberal policies – its divestment in the public sphere, instituted by the shift from a welfare state to a state that facilitated globalization – has produced the very culture of violence that it purports to police” (Fregoso, 2003: 19). Most significantly perhaps, Señorita’s critical stance returns to the side of the victims. That Talamatez narrates her own account of the police violence against her is an affirmation of her agency; a subversion of the terror to which she was subjected. The film, thereby, opens a space not only for the investigation of possible explanations of the feminicide but also for courage to circulate among its witnesses.

Global justice networks: Circulating the movement

In an effort to further inform people about the on-going violence against women in the border town of Ciudad Juarez, we encourage people to watch this show tomorrow night. Of course, watching a TV show is not social change, but this film is a vehicle that opens dialogue and will focus a unified voice of political pressure. The wall of government silence, corruption and inaction on these cases is solid, but not uncrackable. Together, we will bring it down. (email circulated by the Mexico Solidarity Network announcing the television debut of Señorita Extraviada)

In places struggling with pervasive violence, fear and impunity, grassroots communication practices play a vital role in opening up spaces for public visibility and encounter that have heretofore been enclosed by fear. In the case of the anti-feminicide movement, Señorita brings the story of impunity to the public stage while it challenges government and media deflection strategies of individualization and responsibilization. In this dangerous context, the problem of distribution and exhibition remains central to any consideration of the capacity for a documentary such as Señorita to grapple with the problem of evidence. Given the power monopoly of commercial media distribution and exhibition networks, the alternative media movements, from Third Cinema to feminist documentary, have long emphasized the political centrality of autonomous distribution. And Señorita has played an invaluable part in the struggle to revise the lurid, victim-blaming visibility of the feminicide. In so doing, it has opened spaces of encounter among groups and individuals seeking justice in a context of atomizing fear. In other words, the importance of its circulation lies not simply in its capacity to represent the problem, but also in its participation in changing it.

Señorita has traveled widely. The significance of the documentary, as a political intervention, lies in its capacity to represent the unspeakable and present a counter-narrative of the violence that privileges social agency. Its impact is also inextricably anchored to Portillo’s effective connection with the movement in a way that turns that representation of death into a sensitive polemic against impunity. Such a stance encourages viewers to become witnesses to two inextricable violations: the horrible murders and the impunity that provides the feminicide’s accelerant. Through her innovative approach to circulating the film, Portillo uses radical investigative documentary as a communication practice.

Of the many cultural interventions on the feminicide, Portillo’s is considered to have had the greatest impact. Its widespread circulation is rooted in the hard, effective work of activist groups in publicizing the story, and from the time of Señorita’s release in 2001, the feminicide has become a flashpoint issue in Mexico and it has been the focus of a great deal of high-profile international attention and action. The wide circulation of Señorita – from outdoor pirate screenings in Mexico City to international film festivals and screenings in Canada, Spain, Italy, Greece, Norway, Thailand and the US among others, to a feature on PBS’s independent documentary programme POV, to screenings with the victims’ loved ones, artists, activists and even government officials and maquiladora operators in Juarez – has helped raise the domestic and international profile of the crimes and the justice movement.

The timing of the film’s release coincided with a profound moment of convergence of events and organizations. In November 2001, despite a round of spectacular arrests, eight mutilated women’s bodies were dumped across from the headquarters of the Maquiladora Association. A Juarez defence lawyer who was working on feminicide cases was assassinated by the police. At this point, the official strategy of victim-blaming started to unravel and hundreds of feminist and human rights organizations from around the border region joined existing movement networks (Fregoso, 2003). In December 2001, 30,000 protesters from both sides of the border converged on Juarez. In March 2002, hundreds of women dressed in black marched the 370 kilometres from Chihuahua City to the Juarez–El Paso border. Students, elders, factory workers, professionals, housewives and others were among the participants in the “Exodus for Life” campaign, which sought to connect the global movement against neoliberalism and the rise of state terror on the border (Fregoso, 2003). These profile brought by these events speak to how vital international ties are for women’s claims to justice and autonomy from the state (Schmidt Camacho, 2010). If it were not for this international pressure, the late feminist activist Esther Chavez Cano asserted, there would be no official response whatsoever (Schmidt Camacho, 2010).

Despite the upsurge in the movement’s profile, the murders continued apace and activist groups faced ongoing threats (Fregoso, 2012). For Portillo, the urgency of the situation demanded a more aggressive approach to distribution. So she refinanced her house and spent a year touring the world screening Señorita at film festivals, activist and community spaces, in schools, conferences and universities. The film began winning numerous awards, which helped to raise awareness internationally. Portillo collaborated with Mexican filmmaker Maria Navaro who organized numerous screenings in Mexico City. Individuals made and circulated copies through informal channels. The film’s first public screening in the capital’s leafy Coyoacan Plaza brought over 2,000 people out. Afterwards, two of Mexico’s most prominent public intellectuals, Elena Poniatowska and Carlos Monsivais, led a discussion with the audience (Portillo, 2003). By December 2002, large demonstrations converged in front of Mexico City’s National Palace, demanding a federal investigation into the feminicide. At this point, the mainstream media coverage started to turn its attention to state corruption and official indifference (Fregoso, 2003).

Señorita’s contribution to circulating the story of the feminicide beyond the border region, and its animating role within the movement in Mexico and internationally, speaks to its important connection with a broader critique of neoliberal insecurity. For Fregoso, Señorita is an activist film because it “refuses to withdraw from political action … expressing moral outrage and seizing terror through confrontations” (Fregoso, 2003: 25). It does this on an aesthetic level, and through its connection with global justice movements in a way that amplifies collective power over official and media attempts at individualization and responsibilization.

Conclusion

In an essay about her experience of making Señorita, Portillo explains that the film received such widespread international attention because it portrays Juarez’s feminicide victims as persons whose lives were stolen in the most awful and unspeakable way. “Up until that moment,” she maintains, “they had been just statistics of ‘poor brown women,’ not human beings who deserved action and justice on their behalf” (Portillo, 2003: 231). At the outset of her film, Portillo establishes that she found the victims’ loved ones and political activists working on the case to be the most credible voices in a story mired in misinformation, cover-ups and intimidation. Señorita poses a direct challenge to the official story, which has attributed the disappearances and murders to some combination of the women’s fault, the unfortunate yet inevitable cost of rapid and uneven modernization, a result of the dangerous flux of a border zone, and the illicit temptations of the city’s underworld, all of which is fueled, in the state and media narrative, by women’s reckless presence in public.

Conversely, the documentary’s counter-narrative is centred on the testimonies and expert knowledge of victims, survivors and activists. With this perspective, it provides a critique of the derivative portrayals of the feminicide that have made invisible the actually existing social agency of the story’s protagonists. As a powerful indictment of the exploitative politics of representation, which has dominated the commercial media’s portrayal of the violence, Señorita’s image dialectic forces open the space of representation to ignite a process of communication. Like a number of artistic interventions into Juarez’s feminicide, such as Claudia Bernal’s “Monument to Ciudad Juarez” and Teresa Margollis’ “¿De qué otra cosa podríamos hablar?” (“What Else Could We Talk About?”), the film’s aesthetic resonates with art critic Jill Bennett’s (2012) notion of “practical aesthetics.” In the case of traumatic events, Bennett argues, practical aesthetics extend traditional media strategies of documentation and witnessing, “to explore the nature of the event’s perception or impression and hence to participate in its social and political configuration” (Bennett, 2012: 6). Such aesthetic interventions evoke a central question for artists and filmmakers trying to intervene politically in sites of collective anguish: what can art do and what can it become in its relation with the lived experience of traumatic events? And as I have argued here, Señorita’s aesthetic strategy, together with its inventive approach to exhibition and circulation, aims to provoke a public reckoning with the confusion and pain wrought by both the crimes and the dominant narratives of responsibilization and individualization.

Here I have sought to show how the film re-appropriates the space of representation from the state and the commercial media’s sensational reproduction of the violence as a contest of numbers and victim blaming, to open up spaces of communication enclosed by fear. Through a close reading of Señorita as a strategy of representation and circulation that resonates with Carrie Rentschler’s contention that “culture is a space for political struggle” (Rentscher, 2011: 26), I have argued that Portillo’s documentary provides an important example of grassroots communication which, I hope, adds to the fruitful body of research on how neoliberal narratives of responsibilization and individualization reproduce a symbolic and structural environment infused with fear and injustice.