Christian Poveda, Documentary Filmmaker Shot Dead
A French filmmaker who recently finished a documentary about a violent street gang in El Salvador was found shot dead in the town of Tonacatepeque, about 10 miles northeast of the capital city of San Salvador, authorities said.
Christian Poveda, 52, was shot at least four times in the face, according to local reports.
Poveda’s documentary, “La Vida Loca,” which follows the lives of members of the Mara 18 street gang, had been screened at a handful of film festivals and is slated for wider release later this month. His body was found in an area controlled by that same gang, local reports said.
A motive of Poveda’s murder Wednesday was being investigated, National Civil Police Director Carlos Ascencio Giron said in a statement. Citing the pending investigation, police did not immediately give any details, but Ascencio Giron said that the homicide and organized crime divisions of his department were handling the case jointly with the attorney general’s office.
Salvadoran President Mauricio Funes said he was “very shocked” by the news of the murder.
According to a statement by the president’s office, Poveda first arrived in El Salvador in the 1980s to cover the civil war as a photojournalist. He left to report from other war zones, but returned to research and film the gangs in El Salvador.
Poveda on Wednesday was traveling in his car on after filming in a town called Soyapango when unknown assailants intercepted him and then shot him, according to the statement.
La Vida Loca (Crazy Life), Poveda’s latest film, focused on the hopeless and brutal lives of various fantastically tattooed members of Mara 18.
Several of the gangsters were killed or jailed during filming and the documentary records disturbing scenes of gang members gunned down in the streets, relatives crying over coffins and young female gangsters with tattooed faces.
The film is critical of the heavy police crackdown on gang members, which Poveda felt failed to take account of the hopeless poverty and personal tragedy that drive young Salvadorans to turn to crime.
“We have to understand why a 12- or 13-year-old child joins a gang and gives his life to it,” Poveda said in a recent interview with El Faro, a Salvadoran online newspaper.
“Children who have terrible family problems, or come from poor families who don’t have time to take care of their children.”
The film concedes that gangs spread terror, but also describes the young gang members as captivating and as representative of the breakdown of family life in El Salvador.
The Mara 18 and rival Mara Salvatrucha gangs form part of a huge criminal network that runs down through Central America from Los Angeles, where there is a large community of Salvadoran expats.
Report – Street Gang Smuggling Terrorists into U.S.
Agent Mike Scioli of the U.S. Border Patrol confirms that the Tucson sector of the Border Patrol is facing a worsening problem with Mara Salvatrucha, a Salvadoran street gang that now controls the flow of arms, drugs, and illegal aliens into the U.S.
After 9/11, Mara Salvatrucha attracted the attention of top al Qaeda officials, who realized that the gang could be used to smuggle operatives and weapons into the United States. An agreement was forged between the terrorists and the gang-bangers.
In exchange for safe passage across the border, al Qaeda – through its cells in South America – agreed to pay the Maras from $30,000 to $50,000 for each sleeper agent they managed to smuggle into the country with bogus matricula consulars.
