Lopez joins Hollywood trail to Mexico’s murder town
The plight of more than 400 women murdered in a Mexican city in the last 12 years is to get the Hollywood treatment in a new movie starring Jennifer Lopez.
Lopez and co-stars Antonio Banderas and Martin Sheen are currently filming in the Mexican border town of Nogales, where a set resembling the streets of Ciudad Juarez, where the murders took place, has been erected.
In Bordertown, Lopez plays a Chicago-based reporter whose crusading investigations in Juarez, just across the border from Texas, awaken her sense of identity as a Latin woman. Banderas plays a US-trained reporter who runs a local newspaper and Sheen plays Lopez’s editor, who is reluctant to take the story seriously.
Close to 400 women have been killed in Juarez since the count began in 1993. Over 100 were serial-type murders targeting young, dark, pretty and poor women, many of whom worked in the massive assembly-for-export factories that dominate the Juarez economy, along with a local drug trafficking cartel. Most were raped, strangled and dumped in the city’s desert hinterland.
Film-makers and Hollywood stars have become increasingly interested in the story of Juarez. Minnie Driver stars in an independent movie, The Virgin of Juarez, shot last year but as yet unreleased, in which she also plays a journalist. In 2003, Jane Fonda appeared in a star-studded benefit performance of The Vagina Monologues in a Juarez sports stadium.
But some of the victims’ families are beginning to tire of the attention. “It doesn’t help us at all, there is still no justice and no help for the families,” said Celia de la Rosa, whose teenage daughter’s raped and strangled body was found in a cotton field in 2001 with seven other victims. “This is making money out of our daughters’ murders,” she said.
Bordertown has avoided the risk of creating such resentment. Most of it has been shot in the US, with the Mexican location in Nogales, a town west of Juarez. So far the curious have been able to see Lopez running down the street in a blonde wig. Hundreds of locals have also been recruited as extras. The film is written and directed by Gregory Nava, who gave Lopez her big break as the star of the 1997 biopic of murdered Texmex icon Selena.
Source: film.guardian.co.uk
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Teotitlan del Camino, en route to Oaxaca, is a glaringly bright town with a military base. Vehicles are stopped occasionally; make sure, if driving, that your papers are in order. From Teotitlan it is possible to drive into the hills to the Indian town of Huautla de Jimenez, where the local Mazatec Indians consume the hallucinogenic 'magic' mushrooms made famous by Dr Timothy Leary. Huautla has all four seasons of the year in each day; springlike mornings; wet, foggy afternoons; fresh, autumn evenings; and freezing nights. Hiking in the mountains here is worthwhile. There is the hotel Oh'mpico, E, above
