Sad look at serial killings in Mexico

Lourdes Portillo’s elegiac “Senorita Extraviada” documents with low-key persistence the conditions in Ciudad Juarez that make some say, “There is no better place in the world to kill a young woman.” Since the mid-’90s, about 230 teens and young women have been killed -- the actual number may be as high as 400 -- and no one ever seems to be brought to justice.

Two key factors in making such bloodshed possible, Portillo points out, are that the city, just across the border from El Paso, is a hub from which drugs are smuggled into the U.S. and that the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement has greatly accelerated its industrialization. About 80% of the assembly-line factories are American-owned, and they employ 185,000 workers, mainly young women. Many are from rural areas of Mexico and are willing to work long hours for $4 or $5 a day, to a large extent displacing the male work force.

Thus, a large population of poor, unsophisticated young women is at the mercy of a city in which police and local government corruption is obvious and in which there are many out-of-work men. Ineptitude and machismo coalesce at every level of the bureaucracy. Chillingly, Portillo reveals that 50 women were killed in the 18 months it took her to make her film. (The newspaper El Diario de Ciudad Juarez reported Monday the discovery of the corpses of three more teen girls.)

Not surprisingly, Portillo faced a huge challenge in getting a purchase on the continual disappearance of young women that has stretched back more than a decade. She uncovers the outlines of what seem to be a vast conspiracy with drug trafficking as its basis, and the ritual rape, torture and killing a byproduct of murderers getting their kicks in the most extreme ways imaginable.

Some evidence suggests that the victims have been ensnared by a network of predators, seemingly in the factories themselves. One brave woman’s hellish ordeal at the hands of police, when she sought help after her husband was attacked, suggests that the police may well be the principal predators.

Families of victims could take heart in 1998 when a forthright, bright young female special prosecutor, Suly Ponce, was appointed to investigate. She found that police had disposed of an immense amount of evidence, and that they had taken no care to prevent contamination of the burial sites of some of the victims. But Ponce concedes that her powers are limited, and one activist bluntly declares: “The government is wholly responsible: They’re either doing it or covering it up.”

Portillo talks with many families who have lost daughters, all of whom are described as hard-working girls helping to support their relatives, and a far cry from the prostitutes that the governor of Chihuahua suggested they were in the early ‘90s as the deadly epidemic was beginning. Virtually all of the victims have been young, slim, dark and with shoulder-length hair. As the last decade wore on and the death toll mounted, the victims’ families gradually banded together to demand justice. Lourdes Portillo leaves us feeling that they’re in for a long wait.

*

‘Senorita Extraviada’

MPAA rating: Unrated

Times guidelines: Graphic description of an epidemic of rape and murder involving mutilation.

A Women Make Movies and Balcony Releasing release. Producer-director Lourdes Portillo. Associate producer and researcher Gemma Cubero del Barrio. Writers Olivia Crawford, Julia Mackaman, Sharon Wood. Cinematographer Kyle Kibbe. Editor Vivien Hilgrove. Music Todd Boekelheide. In Spanish and English, with English narration and subtitles. Running time 1 hour, 14 minutes.

Exclusively at the Nuart through Thursday, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd., West Los Angeles, (310) 478-6379.