On Monday 28 October, the Frontline Club screened The Engineer, a documentary uncovering the extent of gang violence in El Salvador directed by Mathew Charles and Juan Passarelli. The Q&A that followed was chaired by Stephen Jukes, Dean of the Media School at Bournemouth University.
The Engineer portrays the work of Israel Ticas, the only criminologist in El Salvador who unearths mass graves in search of hundreds of missing humans – many teenagers among them – killed during the ongoing gang conflict. When the two biggest gangs MS-13 and 18 Street declared a truce in 2012, the murder rate fell but the number of disappearances has been rising since.
After the screening, Charles and Passarelli provided the audience with personal background information on the total of three months they spent with Ticas, to get an insight into his day-to-day job. When Jukes asked what effect accompanying the engineer to underground sites and to film fragmented bodies had, Charles remembered:
“Once we shot the material we had to put it in a drawer for a while. When you’re there, you’re so focused on making sure you get the right shots but when you’re editing, that’s a different story. . . . I think in retrospect it affected us more than we thought.”
When a member of the audience asked about the role of the police in the conflict and whether they observed cases of corruption, Passarelli said:
“There are rumours that gang members infiltrate the police. . . . Indeed, many police officers didn’t care [about identifying victims]. Ticas does and in a way he’s the only hope for many families.”
A member of the public said she despised the portrayal of blood and violence. “Killing looks like something people become addicted to and that feels hopeless to me.”
Another guest added that even reconstructing scenes of crime is immoral: “I looked at the engineer and I thought he was a monster.”
Charles concluded the debate by referring to a personal strategy behind Ticas’ job:
“The engineer had an eccentric personality and a lot of it was show, but maybe that was his mechanism of coping with it.”
The future of the gang conflict is also set to be influenced by El Salvador’s presidential elections in February 2014. The current President Mauricio Funes (FMLN) is said to have facilitated the truce that has come under increased scrutiny as drug trafficking and other criminal activities continue.
A web version of the documentary with additional footage and information is available here and you can watch the trailer below:
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Israel Ticas spends more time with corpses than with his own family. His life is in danger, but he continues to unearth secret mass graves to identify the hundreds of missing teenagers lost to El Salvador’s brutal gang conflict. He is the country’s only criminologist, nicknamed “The Engineer” as he combines his forensic skills with his background in system engineering to get the job done.
In 2012 the two biggest gangs (MS-13 and 18 Street) declared a controversial truce. While the murder rate fell dramatically from 14 to 5 a day, this is not the full picture, the statistics fail to account for the rise in the number of disappearances.
In The Engineer, filmmakers Mathew Charles and Juan Passarelli offer a unique insight into the fight against gang murders in El Salvador.
Directed by Mathew Charles and Juan Passarelli
Duration: 93′
Year: 2013
"There’s a definite lack of leaders [today]," documentary producer Richard Symons commented to a Frontline Club audience on 8 October. "Where are they?"
Symons had just screened the third film in his and Joanna Natasegara’s series The Price of Kings, which explores the weight of leadership. Previous films have focused on Yasser Arafat and Shimon Peres.
One true leader, the latest Price of Kings film suggests, has been Oscar Arias, two-time President of Costa Rica.
In 1987, he famously defied American and Soviet insistence – "an incredible amount of pressure," one aide put it – that Costa Rica pick a side in the Cold War proxy battles that were tearing Central America apart.
"I had to fight Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev," Arias reflects in the film. "It was not gonna be easy, to say to Goliath, ‘well, here’s David, little David, but we’re gonna fight for our convictions, for our principles, for our ideals."
Peace was Arias’ ideal. With no military behind him – Costa Rica’s disbanded in 1948 – he nonetheless broke from Washington and Moscow to bring ideologically-opposed Central American leaders to a negotiating table.
"Dial back to 1986," Symons said, "if you looked at those guys and what was going on in their countries, Arias must have been absolutely off his tits to think he could even get them on the phone!"
The Esquipulas Peace Agreement resulted, settling bloody conflicts that raged between Kremlin- and American-backed groups fighting for power over Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. His efforts earned him the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize.
"In person, he’s an oddly persuasive man," Natasegara shared. "He’s not necessarily hugely charismatic, and yet there’s something right about what he says, and you see how he could have convinced them."
In 2006, Arias risked his legacy by serving once more as Costa Rica’s President; the film shows how his dogged support for an unpopular mining project left his reputation among Costa Ricans in tatters.
Today, he campaigns – so far unsucessfully – for an International Arms Treaty that would halt the flow of weapons from idustrialized nations to the third world.
"Use the dividends of peace," Arias says simply, "[and] the world would be quite different, it seems to me."
After the screening, an audience member wondered why so many people in the film, even those very close to Arias, did not speak entirely positively about him. Natasegara answered,
"Ironically, I think apart from two people in the film […] everybody was very warm about him. And I think that’s what’s nice […] that they feel so much trust in him that they can speak openly about his flaws […] So if they speak badly towards him, it’s only because he allows this kind of openness."
The trailer for The Price of Kings: Oscar Arias can be seen here.
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The killing of documentary maker Christian Poveda represents a sad loss for a region much in need of greater understanding.
The first, last and only time that I met the French-born filmmaker and photographer Christian Poveda was on 1 April of this year, when I interviewed him in an apartment he was renting in Mexico City while doing promotion for his film, La Vida Loca.
I’d seen the documentary the night before at a screening attended by Poveda, who fielded questions on why he chose to spend 16 months following members of El Salvador’s notoriously violent 18th Street gang with a video camera. It is a film that could well have brought him to his violent end.
Poveda was shot dead on Wednesday 4 September just outside San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, where he lived. Sources say that the night before he was killed, Poveda confessed to being afraid and worried that the gangs were taking a turn for the worse, with a new crop of ever-more vicious leaders coming to the fore.
La Vida Loca is a groundbreaking documentary that shines a light onto the bleak lives of El Salvador’s Mara gangs. Poveda achieved unprecedented, long-term access to certain branches of the gangs and their daily lives in the capital.
I’m not one to speculate on who might be responsible for his death — the disorder, impunity and lawlessness in El Salvador means we might never know. But his murder is a terrible loss, not only to his friends, family and colleagues, but to the journalistic community in Latin America, which already suffers some of the highest rates of aggression and intimidation against members of the trade.
To Poveda, the young people who join las Maras were “victims of society”. He approached the gangs as a documentary filmmaker with an open mind and a lack of moral judgment.
As he said to me during our interview, he was of the opinion that “the majority are young boys that were abandoned at a very young age, and the fact that someone would come from another continent to spend time with them on a daily basis, filming and listening to them, for them that was something very important, that someone was paying attention.”
Many would disagree with Poveda’s assessment of the gangs that stretch across Central America to the United States. Poveda worked as a photojournalist in El Salvador during and after the 12-year-long civil war, which began in 1980. But the gangs really took on their current strength and size in the United States.
Gangs were formed by Salvadorans living on the streets of Los Angeles in the 1980s, many of who went to the US to escape the civil war ravaging El Salvador. When the peace accords that ended the war were signed in El Salvador in the early 1990s, huge numbers of gang members returned to the country, some of them by choice but most of them through deportation by US authorities. Many were sent back after completing prison sentences.
Although gangs did exist on a small scale in El Salvador before the mass return of migrants from the US, they only grew into the super-gangs they are today after the end of the civil war. The brutally violent groups have been connected with organized crime and other illegal activities across the Americas.
But however you view the gangs, Poveda did what good journalists do — he broadened the discussion, taking a new visual and journalistic angle on an issue that has become so black and white. As the United States continues to sweep the issue of immigration reform under the carpet and turn a blind eye to the repercussions of some of its policies on its smaller, poorer, weaker neighbours, Poveda put some of those realities up on cinema screens on both sides of the Atlantic for all to see.
Tragically, he paid the highest price for doing so.
La Vida Loca, which has been showing on the international film festival circuit, is coming up for commercial release in Mexico and France over the next two months. But the day after Poveda’s death, his producer Gustavo Angel was still trying to negotiate a US release for the film.
I can’t help feeling that if La Vida Loca isn’t seen by audiences within the United States, many of whom have never traveled south of the border, let alone as far south as Central America, we will miss an opportunity to advance the discussion surrounding America’s gang and immigration problems — issues that are inextricably linked.
Deborah Bonello is a blogger and video journalist MexicoReporter.com
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