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Fiona Jeffries
communication in Ciudad Juarez
Documentary noir in the city of fear: Feminicide, impunity and grassroots
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Documentary noir in the city of fear:
Feminicide, impunity and grassroots
communication in Ciudad Juarez
Fiona Jeffries
Simon Fraser University, Canada
Abstract
The emergence of a systematic campaign of horrific violence directed at women and girls in the
Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez has become a focus of intense media and activist attention
over the last two decades. While the mainstream media devoted much attention to ravaged bodies
and sensational theories, state officials reacted to the crimes with a victim-blaming narrative that,
activists have argued, provided a lethal accelerant to the violence. This paper explores the role
of documentary film in the investigation and politicization of the murders and disappearances of
women in Juarez. Along with activists and journalists, critical documentary filmmakers have been
among the primary investigators of the crimes. In this paper, I argue that these grassroots media
practices have been instrumental in opening spaces of communication that have been enclosed
by pervasive fear and systemic insecurity. I pay specific attention to the ways in which Lourdes
Portillos 2001 documentary Seorita Extraviada interrogates the crimes politically. Through its
critical, engaged approach to the aesthetics and politics of evidence, I argue, the film poses a
counter-narrative to the neoliberal states discourse of responsibilization and individualization in
a context of systemic insecurity.
Keywords
documentary film, fear, gender violence, global grassroots communication, impunity,
individualization, responsibilization
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 citys soaring murder rate
has captured news headlines around the world. Between 2006 and 2012, an estimated 50,000
Corresponding author:
Fiona Jeffries, School of Communication, Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby, British Columbia
V5A 1S6, Canada.
Email: fej@sfu.ca
493916CMC9310.1177/1741659013493916Crime Media CultureJeffries
2013
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302 CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 9(3)
people have been murdered and thousands more have disappeared. With the citys 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 vio-
lence 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 NAFTAs wake?
Prior to Juarezs designation as one of the worlds most violent cities (Fregoso, 2012), journal-
ists, 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 film-
makers 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 instru-
mental 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 vio-
lence 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 inves-
tigations 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 citi-
zen 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 dis-
course of personal responsibility, for Mythen and Walklate, is central to a discernible shift towards
emphasizing each individuals need to develop private strategies of self-protection. This shift is
Jeffries 303
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 states 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 expos and into the domain of global grassroots communication. Such prac-
tices 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 broaden-
ing the debate about victimology and the role culture and media activism plays in the expres-
sion, 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 indi-
vidualization amid the ongoing gender violence in Juarez. In order to work through these themes
I pay particular attention to Lourdes Portillos documentary on the murders, Senorita Extraviada
(Missing Young Woman) (2001). Among the many films on the feminicide, Portillos documentary
has been the most influential and widely circulated treatment of the crimes. The films 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 domi-
nant commercial media. My focus on the vital interpretation that cinema can bring to the crimes
coincides with Nicole Rafter and Michelle Browns (2011) contention that film draws out the emo-
tive intensity, subjective experience and multi-dimensionality of a crime story that traditional aca-
demic 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
Juarezs 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 womens 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 neighbour-
hood. 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 mur-
ders 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 fal-
sifying evidence, manipulation of crime scenes, intimidation of witnesses and torture of suspects
(Amnesty International, 2003; Fregoso, 2003). Womens rights activists and the families of the
victims have denounced the polices sporadic, media-friendly arrests as mere political theatre. Well
before Calderons 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 interna-
tional 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 juridi-
cal term for gendered genocide, is a way of politicizing the murders, making the excessive vio-
lence 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 vio-
lence 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 accumu-
late. 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 con-
stant repetition. In the context of Juarezs 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 increas-
ingly 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 womens 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
Jeffries 305
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 Internationals 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 (Gonzlez Rodriguez, 2012). Since these numbers
started to make headlines in Mexico and internationally in the early 2000s, the Mexican authori-
ties have vociferously put forth drastically lower numbers citing estimates of around 70 an
incongruous discrepancy noted in Amnestys report.
These numbers tell a story of gender violence, but the discrepancies also narrate the connec-
tion of the violence to battles over representation. For the political and commercial classes deter-
mined 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 Gonzlez (2003) argues that the medias 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, crit-
ics 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, Gonzlez 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 (Gonzlez,
2003: 235). Nonetheless, government officials have countered demands for action with accusa-
tions that the women themselves are responsible for their terrible fate and activists are labelled as
enemies of modernity for undermining Juarezs 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 states 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 sexual-
ity to womens 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 states representation of the feminicide is a strategy to control wom-
ens movement in the highly mobile space of the border region at the same time that neoliberal
restructuring reorganizes womens relationship to public and private spheres of production. One
significant expression of this strategy of immobilization and control is in the states 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 womens 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 states refusal to investigate the crimes, social organizations and documen-
tary 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 Biemanns 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. Biemanns 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 Portillos Seorita 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, Seorita
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 Seorita. Amid the swelling representations of the feminicide,
Seorita 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 Juarezs colonias (shantytowns), and the femi-
nist activists who have been working to contextualize the numbers and memorialize the dead and
disappeared. Portillos camera is explicitly pointed at investigating the murders politically through
her search for the storys 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 Im told and everything I read (Portillo, 2001). With
one eye firmly trained on the complicity of the powerful, Seorita 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 Seorita, Portillo recounts that when she arrived in Juarez to investi-
gate the murders, the most significant thing was the silence. How, she wonders, does a
Jeffries 307
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 culpa-
bility is considered, linking powerful criminal networks, the police, the maquila system, and offi-
cials 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, Seorita recognizes that the
murderer is more systemic than the sensational serial killer narratives favored by the tabloid
media allow.
Portillos 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 films treatment of the politics of fear in Juarez. Alison Youngs writing on crime and film
aesthetics provides helpful insight into Portillos 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 Portillos film and other documentary treatments of the femi-
nicide 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 evi-
dence-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 vio-
lent 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 Seorita, it becomes clear that, under the present institu-
tional circumstances, no such resolution can be forthcoming. As the traditional crime documen-
tary 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 Seorita 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 docu-
mentary 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 filmmakers 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 Portillos distinct
practice of a cinema of ambiguity her version of Third Cinema pioneer Julio Garcia Espinosas
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 Seorita does not entirely dispense with the crime documentarys 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 states fraught, highly politicized investiga-
tion. This challenges the viewer to reconsider the conventional documentary treatment of causal-
ity, criminality and punishment as matters of identifying and corralling individual pathologies.
Furthermore, it contests the states 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 states unwillingness to address the ghastly crimes.
Early on in Seorita, Portillo effectively interrogates this strategy with an image dialectic that
juxtaposes her original footage with culled television news footage depicting the tone of the offi-
cial 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 states attorney-general, Jorge Lopez, appears in a television interview enthusiastically tabling
his offices 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 citys villainous characters. When his interviewer points out that the fuel of Juarezs
industrial economy the 24-hour maquila industry that pulls many women into and out of indus-
trial parks at all hours requires a highly mobile labour force, which also happens to be largely
female, Lopez concedes, well, you cant impose this on workers. Seorita then cuts to an inter-
view with a human rights activist who points out that immediately following public pronounce-
ments 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 Seorita 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
Jeffries 309
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 govern-
ment, 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 femi-
nist scholar of violence Rita Segato (2010): is the feminicide a symptom of impunity, as it is tradi-
tionally 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, Seorita launches into an interrogation of the sensational arrest of the feminicides
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
Juarezs 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 incon-
gruous 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, Seorita 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 maq-
uiladoras. 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, Seorita 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 govern-
ments 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, Seorita 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 Seorita 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 Seoritas 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, Seorita 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 womans
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 Juarezs 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 media-
tion of fear (Fregoso, 2003).
The black cross on a pink background, one of the key symbols of Juarezs anti-feminicide
movement, is a central trope used in the film, marking both Seoritas deliberate connection with
the movement and its interrogation of the problem of representation. The crosses started appear-
ing 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 opposi-
tional 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 presss 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 movements 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 cultures lonely spectator-
ship. 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
Jeffries 311
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 Seorita. 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 Seorita, appearing in sharp contrast to the violence of the commercial medias por-
trayal of the women as anonymous, ravaged corpses. Seoritas careful and sensitive use of pho-
tos 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 Juarezs feminicide,
whereby victims are routinely presented in the tabloid media as lurid warnings about the dangers
of the city. Taken for identification cards, quinceaera celebrations and treasured family portraits,
the spectral images act as punctuation marks, signaling narrative transitions and humanizing the
subject. They pull the documentarys witness into a space of identification through their unsettling
everydayness and their emotional intimacy, set against the backdrop of the knowledge of their
subjects death.
I read in this image dialectic an affinity with John Bergers 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 Seoritas use
of quotidian family photos. But his conception of the public and the private could also be consid-
ered as corresponding to a vital distinction between information and communication. While infor-
mation 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 Seoritas 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 Gonzlez, who disappeared
after leaving work, the film considers an alarming theory of the industrys direct role, itself tied to the
use of photos. Gonzlezs grief-stricken mother explains to Portillos camera that someone at the
maquiladora had changed her schedule on that day. Her daughter left the factory without the pro-
tection of her family and vanished. Several of the reproduced images of Gonzlez 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 unin-
terested 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 along-
side the testimonies of Gonzlezs family and other activists, Portillo interrogates the contradictory
situation of poor womens 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 repre-
sentation is highly dependent upon the industrys control of its image. As Melissa Wright argues,
the maquila industrys 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 pro-
cesses (Wright, 2005: 379). Seorita directly entered the debate in 2003, as international atten-
tion on Juarezs feminicide was peaking, when two plant managers tried to block a public
screening organized by activists (Wright, 2004).
Photos are also prominent in Seoritas 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 Talamatezs 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.
Talamatezs 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 interna-
tional observers commonly represent the gender violence in Juarez as a regressive cultural mani-
festation 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).
Talamatezs testimony provides the basis for Seoritas interrogation of the role of the state in
producing a permanent, if undeclared, state of emergency in the context of its neoliberal strategy,
grounding Fregosos contention that Mexicos 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 signifi-
cantly perhaps, Seoritas 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 inves-
tigation 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
Jeffries 313
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 Seorita
Extraviada)
In places struggling with pervasive violence, fear and impunity, grassroots communication prac-
tices play a vital role in opening up spaces for public visibility and encounter that have hereto-
fore been enclosed by fear. In the case of the anti-feminicide movement, Seorita 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 documen-
tary such as Seorita 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 autono-
mous distribution. And Seorita 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 impor-
tance of its circulation lies not simply in its capacity to represent the problem, but also in its
participation in changing it.
Seorita 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 Portillos effective connec-
tion 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 feminicides accelerant.
Through her innovative approach to circulating the film, Portillo uses radical investigative docu-
mentary as a communication practice.
Of the many cultural interventions on the feminicide, Portillos 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 Seoritas 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 Seorita from outdoor pirate screen-
ings 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 PBSs 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 films release coincided with a profound moment of convergence of events
and organizations. In November 2001, despite a round of spectacular arrests, eight mutilated
womens 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 JuarezEl 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 womens 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 movements 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 Seorita at film festivals, activist and community spaces, in schools, confer-
ences and universities. The film began winning numerous awards, which helped to raise aware-
ness internationally. Portillo collaborated with Mexican filmmaker Maria Navaro who organized
numerous screenings in Mexico City. Individuals made and circulated copies through informal
channels. The films first public screening in the capitals leafy Coyoacan Plaza brought over 2,000
people out. Afterwards, two of Mexicos 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 Citys 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).
Seoritas 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, Seorita is an activist film
because it refuses to withdraw from political action expressing moral outrage and seizing ter-
ror 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 Seorita, Portillo explains that the film received such
widespread international attention because it portrays Juarezs 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 estab-
lishes 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. Seorita poses
a direct challenge to the official story, which has attributed the disappearances and murders to
some combination of the womens 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
citys underworld, all of which is fueled, in the state and media narrative, by womens reckless
presence in public.
Conversely, the documentarys counter-narrative is centred on the testimonies and expert
knowledge of victims, survivors and activists. With this perspective, it provides a critique of the
Jeffries 315
derivative portrayals of the feminicide that have made invisible the actually existing social agency
of the storys protagonists. As a powerful indictment of the exploitative politics of representation,
which has dominated the commercial medias portrayal of the violence, Seoritas image dialectic
forces open the space of representation to ignite a process of communication. Like a number of
artistic interventions into Juarezs feminicide, such as Claudia Bernals Monument to Ciudad
Juarez and Teresa Margollis De qu otra cosa podramos hablar? (What Else Could We Talk
About?), the films aesthetic resonates with art critic Jill Bennetts (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 events percep-
tion 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, Seoritas aes-
thetic 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 medias sensational reproduction of the violence as a contest of num-
bers and victim blaming, to open up spaces of communication enclosed by fear. Through a close
reading of Seorita as a strategy of representation and circulation that resonates with Carrie
Rentschlers contention that culture is a space for political struggle (Rentscher, 2011: 26), I have
argued that Portillos documentary provides an important example of grassroots communication
which, I hope, adds to the fruitful body of research on how neoliberal narratives of responsibiliza-
tion and individualization reproduce a symbolic and structural environment infused with fear and
injustice.
Funding
This research was supported by a Post-doctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada.
Filmography
Border Echoes (2007; Mendez-Quiroga). Peace and the Border Productions
Juarez: the city where women are disposable (2007; A Flores and L Vassolo). Las Perlas del Mar Films
Maquila: A Tale of Two Mexicos (2000; Saul Landau and Sonia Angulo)
On the Edge: The Femicide in Ciudad Juarez (2006; Steev Hise). IA Productions
Performing the Border (1999; Ursula Biemann)
Seorita Extraviada (2001; Lourdes Portillo)
Notes
1. At a time when over 100,000 manufacturing jobs vanished in the state of Chihuahua, activists were
blamed for the downturn in the border economy (Wright, 2005).
2. The establishment of free trade manufacturing districts known as Export Processing Zones (EPZs) was
begun by the Mexican government in 1965 as part of its Border Industrialization Program. Juarez was
the first city to establish maquiladora plants in EPZs which then spread along the Mexican side of
the border. Companies operating in EPZs receive tax and tariff exemptions on value added. The term
maquiladora or maquila comes from the Spanish maquilar, the milling of wheat into flour, for
which the farmer would compensate the miller with a portion of the wheat, the maquila. In contempo-
rary use the term describes any partial activity in a manufacturing process, including assembly, packag-
ing and sorting, performed by a worker separately from the original manufacturer. Latest figures are
that in Juarez about 330 maquiladora plants employ around 180,000 workers (MexicoNow Magazine,
issue 56, JanFeb 2012).
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Author biography
Fiona Jeffries is a feminist media and cultural studies scholar whose work focuses on social
and political subjectivities in contexts of crisis and change. She is presently a Visiting Scholar at
Simon Fraser Universitys Centre for Policy Studies on Culture and Communities in Vancouver,
Canada. Her current research explores grassroots struggles for the reconstruction of the
commons in settings riven by systemic fear and insecurity. Her published work includes essays
on feminist politics, media and gender violence, urban social movements, and the role of
grassroots political communication practices in the production of alternative globalizations.

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