Mexico's murdered women find a voice in `Bordertown'

When they began shooting "Bordertown," the new Jennifer Lopez film about the hundreds of murdered women of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, director Gregory Nava and executive producer Barbara Martinez Jitner expected that their movie would stir up strong reactions. Already, they allege, those reactions have included death threats against Nava and the cast, stolen equipment and intimidation of a film crew member during shooting in Mexico.

Since 1993, the bodies of more than 400 female victims, many raped and mutilated, have been found in the area around Ciudad Juarez, a sprawling metropolis where many poor women work for \o7maquiladora\f7s (factories). Scores of additional women throughout the region, across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, have been reported missing.

Speaking by phone recently while en route to the Berlin Film Festival, where the film will have its world premiere Thursday, Nava said he's not surprised by the film's hostile reception in some quarters, given the issues that "Bordertown" raises and the blame for the murders that it assigns not only to the Mexican government but to the United States and to the multinational assembly plants spawned by the North American Free Trade Agreement.

"There are very powerful forces involved, you're going to be attacked," said Nava, a Mexican American who was born in San Diego. "I expect the Mexican government to get very upset about it."

"Bordertown," which does not have a U.S. release date, stars Lopez as a U.S. reporter investigating the murders and Antonio Banderas as a Mexican newspaper colleague. The cast also includes Martin Sheen, Sonia Braga and Maya Zapata as a young Indian woman factory worker whose plight exposes the crimes of Juarez.

Nava and Lopez previously worked together on "My Family" (1995) and on the biopic "Selena" (1997), about the Texas tejano singer, which helped catapult Lopez to fame. Nava said that he approached Lopez in 1998 about joining on with "Bordertown" and she agreed.

"I felt it was really something that was screaming to be talked about and brought to the surface," said Lopez, speaking by phone from Madrid. "What we hope to do with the movie is just getting people aware of what's going on down there."

Much of the film was shot in and around Albuquerque, with additional shooting in the Mexican border town of Nogales, Sonora and in Ciudad Juarez.