May 21, 2006
400 Dead Women: Now Hollywood Is Intrigued
By PAT H. BROESKE
THE killings, nearly everyone agrees, began in 1993. The victims, all poor women, were raped, strangled and mutilated, with signs of ritual murder. Because they were a particular type — young and slender, with brown skin and long brown hair — there was speculation about a serial killer.
The crimes took place in Juárez, Mexico, just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, and they have continued for 13 years, with no end in sight.
With a body count now estimated at some 400, the killings have been called the maquiladora murders because some of the victims worked in the city's factories, which are also known as maquiladoras.
Given that kind of sensationalism, it was inevitable that Hollywood would enter the picture, and now it has, twice. "The Virgin of Juárez," a drama with a supernatural subplot starring Minnie Driver, was made for just $1 million and is playing the festival circuit. Meanwhile "Bordertown" — an action-thriller with Jennifer Lopez budgeted at $35 million — is in post-production, though a release date has not been set. The scripts for both were read in advance by Artists for Amnesty, the Hollywood arm of Amnesty International, for suggestions about the depiction of the case facts. But based on a screening of the former and the screenplay for the latter, neither movie suggests the scope of the issue.
For the mystery of the murdered women of Juárez has evolved into more than a crime story. Words like "femicide," "machismo," "misogyny" and "impunity" have entered a much broader debate about the city and its connection to issues of race, class and gender. And, less predictably, Juárez has become the heart of an impassioned grass-roots artists' movement.
"I realized I could put something together to echo the voices of the victims," said Azul Luna, a Los Angeles photographer and digital artist who traveled to Juárez to document the scene. The founder of an artists' collective that raises awareness about the crimes and the larger issue of violence again women, she once led a caravan of artists from California to El Paso and across the river to Juárez.
In Los Angeles, Rubén Amavizca's play "The Women of Juárez" ("Las Mujeres de Juárez") has become a staple at the Frida Kahlo Theater, with performances in both English and Spanish. Several books, both fiction and nonfiction, are in the works, and there have been songs about the killings by the Mexican groups Los Tigres del Norte and Jaguares, and by Tori Amos.
The Juárez violence has also become the subject of treatises in scholarly journals and university symposiums and has galvanized human rights and women's rights activists. And American celebrities have become involved: on May 9, Jane Fonda and Eve Ensler were among those who participated in a Mexico City reading of Ms. Ensler's feminist work, "The Vagina Monologues," with proceeds benefiting a women's shelter in Juárez. Two years earlier Ms. Fonda, Sally Field, Christine Lahti and Ms. Ensler led a much-publicized march from El Paso to Juárez.
Juárez, Mexico's fourth-largest city, with a population of about 1.3 million, is a teeming industrial center dominated by hundreds of multinational assembly plants. Women drawn to Juárez from villages across Mexico provide the majority of the cheap labor, typically for about $6 a day.
As bodies continue to turn up, so have a host of theories. Satanists, organ harvesters and drug cartels have been among the suspects. (Juárez is a major drug conduit to the United States.) So have the sons of wealthy men, who, it has been said, hunt and kill women for sport. Even husbands and boyfriends have been suspected. But so far the only consensus is that a phenomenon once attributed to a single serial killer has become a wider crime wave involving multiple murderers.
"Now it's a monster," the actress Vanessa Bauche said in a telephone interview from Mexico City. "You can cut off one head, and there will appear three more. This is one of the darkest stories in Latin America."
The founder of an artists' group that works with relatives of the Juárez victims, Ms. Bauche, the star of the Mexican New Wave film "Amores Perros," is co-producer of a documentary that will include interviews with victims' relatives, some of whom have received threats. "The only way we have to protect them is to make them famous," she said.
The killings have been the subject of numerous Spanish-language television programs in both Mexico and in the United States on the Telemundo and Univision networks, as well as several lurid direct-to-video movies. On a more literate front, the acclaimed Mexican playwright Sabina Berman has recently completed the script for "Backyard," a film based on four true stories. "My screenplay is very social minded, political minded," she said. "It talks about the politics of globalization. Juárez is just one example of what can go wrong with globalization."
Ms. Berman said she applauded Hollywood's interest in Juárez, "not just the crimes, but the wave of violence against women," adding, "Of course it would be better to not trivialize and sensationalize, or sexualize, the story."
Debbie Nathan, a journalist who has written extensively about border issues and sexual politics, questioned Hollywood's tendency to simplify. "This situation is about so much more than serial killers," said Ms. Nathan, who worries that movies about the murders "could be a kind of reality porn."
The Australian director Kevin James Dobson said he shared some of that concern when making "The Virgin of Juárez."
"Did I worry about exploitation?" he said. "In a word, yes. The attacks I showed are fictionalized, but the facts spoken are true."
Mr. Dobson said he first learned about the murdered women while searching a Web site about serial killers. "I had the idea to bring Joan of Arc to Juárez," he said, referring to a victim (played in the movie by Ana Claudia Talancón) who develops stigmata and has visions, and who is befriended by a feisty female reporter.
"Bordertown" is also about a female reporter, played by Ms. Lopez, who befriends an attack victim (Maya Zapata). Gregory Nava, the film's writer and director, who previously teamed with Ms. Lopez on the 1997 film "Selena," declined requests for an interview. And the publicist for Ms. Lopez, who is also the film's executive producer, did not respond to requests for an interview with the star.
Marisela Ortiz, a former teacher of one of the Juárez victims and an advocate for victims and their relatives, said she welcomed the prospect of a Hollywood movie about the murders, "in spite of the film presenting a different premise from reality." She was referring to scenes in "Bordertown" pointing to a group of bus drivers as the culprits, a theory that has since been debunked.
The catalyst for many of the artists, filmmakers and activists involved in the Juárez mystery was a 2001 documentary titled "Señorita Extraviada" ("Missing Young Woman"). The veteran Bay Area filmmaker Lourdes Portillo spent 18 months on the project, which received a special jury prize at Sundance four years ago and was broadcast on PBS in the United States. To this day it grips a viewer's attention, from the opening narration, "The desert is full of secrets, some of them buried in the sands," to its accusations of police and governmental negligence and cover-ups.
"You are talking about a very complex problem involving a culture that diminishes the role of women in life," said Ms. Portillo, a native of Chihuahua, in northern Mexico.
A number of new documentaries from both sides of the border are in the works, including Lorena Mendez-Quiroga's "Border Echoes" ("Ecos de Una Frontera"). A freelance television reporter and the founder of the Los Angeles-based Justice for the Women of Juárez, Ms. Mendez-Quiroga made more than 30 trips to Juárez and mortgaged her house to complete the film, which looks at the crimes through the eyes and investigative work of Diana Washington Valdez, a reporter at The El Paso Times who has long been at the forefront of the Juárez story. Ms. Valdez has said she is going to be "naming names" of suspects in the film, which Ms. Mendez-Quiroga hopes to screen at the next Sundance Film Festival.
Another project in development is an HBO feature written by Josefina Lopez, a playwright and screenwriter whose credits include the screenplay for the 2001 film "Real Women Have Curves." To research her project Ms. Lopez visited a desert area near Juárez called Lomas de Poleo, where the bodies of eight young women were found. "I'm very sensitive in that sometimes I can pick up energy," she said, "like ghosts and stuff like that. And as I stood there, I could feel the souls of the women, their spirits."
Ms. Lopez went on to talk about the women who ventured to Juárez from central and southern Mexico in search of work, only to die gruesomely. "When I stood and looked where the bodies had been dumped, I kept thinking, these poor women, their spirits, they're wandering," she said, raising a question that filmmakers and other artists are now left to answer. "How are they ever going to get home?"

Hepatitis B Risk

May 11, 2006
Hepatitis Risk for East Asians in New York
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA and MARC SANTORA
Among east Asian immigrants in New York City, one person in seven carries the hepatitis B virus, a new study has found. The condition puts them at far greater risk than other Americans for deadly diseases like liver cancer and cirrhosis.
Most of the people tested had no idea that they were infected, a fact that frustrates doctors who know that with proper screening and treatment, the disease can be controlled, if not cured. But three-quarters of the people in the study had no health insurance, and even those who did had trouble getting coverage for screening.
The study, led by researchers at New York University School of Medicine, found that 15 percent of east Asians in New York — as many as 100,000 people — are chronic hepatitis carriers, with the rate highest among immigrants from China. That infection rate is 35 times the rate found in the general population.
Because Hepatitis B is endemic in many Asian countries, growth in the number of Asian immigrants in New York and across the country has made the disease a broad, expensive, emerging health problem. In the 2000 census, there were 800,000 Asians in the city, with roughly half from China.
Hepatitis B, like hepatitis C, is generally contracted through the blood, and is not transmitted through casual contact with infected people. Hepatitis A, which is caused by a different virus, can be transmitted through food, but hepatitis B cannot, with very rare exceptions.
Since the development a generation ago of a vaccine that is given to nearly all children born in the United States and to many adults who are considered at risk, hepatitis B has become rare in this country. While doctors have long worried about the disease in immigrant groups who come from countries like China — which does not have a comprehensive national vaccination program — little has been done to raise awareness of the danger.
"The health care costs are enormous," said Dr. Henry J. Pollack, the lead author of the study, which is to be published late this week in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's journal, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. "If you're giving what would be considered to be the proper care for all these people, it would be hundreds of millions of dollars."
People can carry the hepatitis B virus for decades without showing any signs of illness, until it causes life-threatening diseases like cancer or cirrhosis. "That often is the first sign of trouble," said Dr. Pollack, an associate professor at the medical school.
The New York State cancer registry shows rates of liver cancer among Asian-Americans 6 to 10 times as high as for whites, Dr. Pollack said, a difference that is mostly attributable to hepatitis B. And those figures may underestimate the disparity, because many immigrants who become sick return to their native countries.
Hepatitis B is prevalent in many poor countries, and there are an estimated 350 million cases worldwide. It is most common in China, but scientists do not understand why. In this country, hepatitis B is associated with transmission by sex and intravenous drug use. But in Asia, the disease most commonly passes from mothers who do not know they have it to their children in the womb. It may also be transmitted among children who have close physical contact.
Dr. Thomas Tsang, another principal investigator in the study, said the results confirmed that Asian-Americans face a major health problem that is not captured by national statistics. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated that just 0.4 percent of all Americans have chronic hepatitis B, but experts say that may undercount people from Asia.
"In this past week alone, from those people we screened, I have seen 7 to 10 people who needed to be started on medication because they had abnormal liver tests," said Dr. Tsang, who is chief medical officer of the Charles B. Wang Community Health Center in New York City. Those are people, who without the screening program, would probably have gone untreated until they got so sick they ended up in the hospital.
Representative Mike Honda, Democrat of California and chairman of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, said California faced a problem similar to New York's, one that was going largely unrecognized. "To not do something, when we know we can, is criminal," he said.
Early detection and suppression of the virus can interrupt the cycle of mother-to-child transmission. An adult immune system can usually fight off a new hepatitis B infection, though a small number of cases become chronic. But, Dr. Pollack said, "If you get it when you're an infant, your chance of getting chronic hepatitis B is greater than 90 percent."
In the last decade, doctors have been able to use an array of new drugs to treat chronic infection, but they do not cure the disease. Rather, they often suppress the virus so that it causes little or no harm. The medication must be taken for life.
Previous, smaller studies, cited in the N.Y.U. report, have also found high rates of infection among foreign-born Asian Americans, some as high as 15 percent. But the authors of the N.Y.U. report say theirs is the most comprehensive look at the problem, and the first to search not only for the number of people with hepatitis, but also for significant patterns within those numbers.
The researchers found that people from Fujian province — the biggest source of Chinese immigration to the United States in recent years — had the highest rate of infection, which corresponds to findings by the Chinese government. Men between the ages of 20 to 39 were also more likely than other groups to have the virus; overall, men were twice as likely as women to be infected.
The researchers screened 1,836 Asian-born adults last year at 12 sites in heavily Asian neighborhoods in Queens, Brooklyn and Manhattan. More screenings have been conducted this year, but those results have not yet been analyzed.
Some 61 percent of the subjects, who volunteered for the screening, were born in China, and 30 percent were born in Korea. A small number were from other parts of Asia, and those groups had much lower rates of infection than the Chinese.
Over all, 24 percent of the people screened were found to carry the virus, but that included a large number of people who said they had been tested before, and may already have known that they were infected. Those people might have sought screening to obtain confirmation or treatment. Among those who had been tested previously, 40 percent were infected.
Among those who said they had never been tested, who were just over half the subjects, 15 percent, tested positive. The researchers concluded that this figure, not the higher number, reflected infection rates in the east Asian population as a whole.

Moussaoui´s Sentence

May 5, 2006
One Last Appearance, and Outburst, From Moussaoui
By NEIL A. LEWIS
ALEXANDRIA, Va., May 4 — Judge Leonie M. Brinkema sentenced Zacarias Moussaoui to prison for the rest of his life on Thursday, saying he would be denied his wish to die in a blaze of glory and instead would "die with a whimper."
The courtroom, held under a tight rein during the two-month trial, became a stage for an unexpected outpouring of emotion Thursday as Mr. Moussaoui exchanged barbs with the judge, and family members who lost loved ones excoriated him to his face.
Mr. Moussaoui, in his last chance to be heard in public, delivered a political speech about his hate for America, concluding: "God curse America and save Osama bin Laden. You'll never get him."
Judge Brinkema was clearly angered that when the jury spared Mr. Moussaoui's life on Wednesday, he exulted, "America, you lost," and said he had won.
"Well, Mr. Moussaoui, if you look around this courtroom today, every person in this room when this proceeding is over will leave this courtroom, and they are free to go anyplace they want," she said. "They can go outside, they can feel the sun, they smell fresh air."
But she said that when he walked out of the courtroom: "You will spend the rest of your life in a super-maximum security facility. In terms of winners and losers, it's quite clear who won and who lost."
Mr. Moussaoui shot back, "That was my choice."
"It was hardly your choice," Judge Brinkema retorted.
Judge Brinkema, who had been scrupulous about maintaining a neutral stance during the trial, concluded by saying, "As for you, Mr. Moussaoui, you came here to be a martyr and to die in a great big bang of glory, but to paraphrase the poet T. S. Eliot, instead you will die with a whimper."
Mr. Moussaoui tried to interject again, and Judge Brinkema spoke over him, saying, "You will never again get a chance to speak, and that is an appropriate and fair ending."
Because Judge Brinkema was required to sentence Mr. Moussaoui to life in prison after the jury's decision on Wednesday, there was little suspense, but an abundance of drama. It began when Judge Brinkema asked whether there were any family members of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the audience who wanted to be heard.
No one responded initially. As the judge prepared to move on, Rosemary Dillard, whose husband died on American Airlines Flight 77 when it crashed into the Pentagon, rose from the audience.
Walking to a lectern a few feet from Mr. Moussaoui, Mrs. Dillard looked at him and said: "I want you, Mr. Moussaoui, to know how you wrecked my life. You wrecked my career. You took the most important person in my life from me."
As Mr. Moussaoui stared back impassively, she continued, "I hope that you sit in that jail without seeing the sky, without seeing the sun, without any contact with the world and that your name never comes up in any newspaper again during the rest of my life."
She then thanked the judge for "what you did," thanked the prosecutors "for what you tried to do," and the court-appointed defense lawyers for "what you had to do."
She was followed to the lectern by Abraham Scott, who lost his wife at the Pentagon on Sept. 11. Mr. Scott told Mr. Moussaoui that "you and all the rest of your colleagues will not deter this country from continuing to enjoy the freedom that it has for the past 200 years." He added that he was confident Mr. bin Laden would eventually be captured and face justice.
Finally, Lisa Dolan told the court that her husband, a naval officer who died at the Pentagon, had served his country to ensure that it maintained the freedom to conduct fair and open trials like the one just concluded. "There is still one final judgment day," Ms. Dolan concluded, staring at Mr. Moussaoui.
Mr. Moussaoui then took the witness stand after Judge Brinkema invited him to speak before he was sentenced. He said he wanted to respond to the family members who had just spoken.
"The first one say that I destroy her life and she lost her husband," said Mr. Moussaoui, whose native language is French. "Maybe one day she can think how many people the C.I.A. have destroyed their life."
He said Americans had "an amount of hypocrisy which is beyond any belief," adding, "Your humanity is a very selected humanity — only you suffer, only you feel."
When Robert A. Spencer, the chief prosecutor, objected that it was inappropriate for Mr. Moussaoui to make a political speech, Judge Brinkema agreed.
Mr. Moussaoui continued, nonetheless, saying, "You have branded me a terrorist or criminal." In fact, he said, he was a soldier in the Islamic cause, and "I fight for my belief."
He said Americans had forfeited an opportunity to use the trial to discover why people like himself and Mohamed Atta, the pilot of one of the hijacked planes of Sept. 11, "have so much hatred for you." Mr. Moussaoui, who was arrested on immigration charges three weeks before Sept. 11, pleaded guilty last year to conspiracy in the attacks.
As he left the courtroom, Mr. Moussaoui repeated his earlier claim that he would be released by President Bush before he left the White House.
"In your dreams!" Lisa Beilke shouted from the spectator section. Mrs. Beilke's husband died in the Pentagon.
Officials said Mr. Moussaoui would soon be transferred to the federal prison in Florence, Colo., used to house the inmates requiring the greatest security. A prison expert testifying for the defense during the trial said that at the prison Mr. Moussaoui would have no contact with others and would be spoken to only sporadically by guards, probably causing him to deteriorate quickly.

Immigrants in U.S.

May 2, 2006
Immigrants Take to U.S. Streets in Show of Strength
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
LOS ANGELES, May 1 — Hundreds of thousands of immigrants and their supporters skipped work, school and shopping on Monday and marched in dozens of cities from coast to coast.
The demonstrations did not bring the nation to a halt as planned by some organizers, though they did cause some disruptions and conveyed in peaceful but sometimes boisterous ways the resolve of those who favor loosening the country's laws on immigration.
Originally billed as a nationwide economic boycott under the banner "Day Without an Immigrant," the day evolved into a sweeping round of protests intended to influence the debate in Congress over granting legal status to all or most of the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the country.
The protesters, a mix of illegal immigrants and legal residents and citizens, were mostly Latino, but in contrast to similar demonstrations in the past two months, large numbers of people of other ethnicities joined or endorsed many of the events. In some cases, the rallies took on a broader tone of social action, as gay rights advocates, opponents of the war in Iraq and others without a direct stake in the immigration debate took to the streets.
"I think it's only fair that I speak up for those who can't speak for themselves," said Aimee Hernandez, 28, one of an estimated 400,000 people who turned out in Chicago, the site of one of the largest demonstrations. "I think we're just too many that you can't just send them back. How are you going to ignore these people?"
But among those who favor stricter controls on illegal immigration, the protests hardly impressed.
"When the rule of law is dictated by a mob of illegal aliens taking to the streets, especially under a foreign flag, then that means the nation is not governed by a rule of law — it is a mobocracy," Jim Gilchrist, a founder of the Minutemen Project, a volunteer group that patrols the United States-Mexico border, said in an interview.
While the boycott, an idea born several months ago among a small group of grass-roots immigration advocates here, may not have shut down the country, it was strongly felt in a variety of places, particularly those with large Latino populations.
Stores and restaurants in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York closed because workers did not show up or as a display of solidarity with demonstrators. In Los Angeles, the police estimated that more than half a million people attended two demonstrations in and near downtown. School districts in several cities reported a decline in attendance; at Benito Juarez High School in Pilsen, a predominantly Latino neighborhood in Chicago, only 17 percent of the students showed up, even though administrators and some protest organizers had urged students to stay in school.
Lettuce, tomatoes and grapes went unpicked in fields in California and Arizona, which contribute more than half the nation's produce, as scores of growers let workers take the day off. Truckers who move 70 percent of the goods in ports in Los Angeles and Long Beach, Calif., did not work.
Meatpacking companies, including Tyson Foods and Cargill, closed plants in the Midwest and the West employing more than 20,000 people, while the flower and produce markets in downtown Los Angeles stood largely and eerily empty.
Israel Banuelos, 23, and more than 50 of his colleagues skipped work, with the grudging acceptance of his employer, an industrial paint plant in Hollister, Calif.
"We were supposed to work," Mr. Banuelos said, "but we wanted to close down the company. Our boss didn't like it money-wise."
The economic impact of the day's events was hard to gauge, though economists expected a one-day stoppage to have little long-term effect. In large swaths of the country, life went on with no noticeable difference. But protesters in numerous cities, many clad in white and waving mostly American flags in response to complaints that earlier rallies featured too many Latin American ones, declared victory as chanting throngs shut down streets.
Most of the demonstrators' ire was directed at a bill passed by the House that would increase security at the border while making it a felony for an illegal immigrant to be in the country or to aid one. The marchers generally favored a plan in the Senate, for which President Bush has shown signs of support, that would include more protection at the border but offer many illegal workers a path to citizenship.
Still, the divide among advocates over the value and effectiveness of a boycott resulted in some cities, including Los Angeles and San Diego, playing host to two sizable demonstrations, one organized by boycotters and the other by people neutral or opposed to it.
That split played out across the country. While many business owners warned employees about taking the day off, many others also sought to negotiate time off or other ways to register workers' sentiments.
Las Vegas casinos reported few disruptions, partly because many of their owners announced their support for workers at a news conference last week. On Monday, more than 40 casinos set up tables in employee lunchrooms for workers to sign pro-immigration petitions.
Leaders of Local 226 of the Culinary Workers Union also urged members to go to work. The union is Las Vegas's largest hospitality union, representing 50,000 workers, of which 40 percent are Hispanic.
Smaller businesses in Las Vegas, where tens of thousands of demonstrators gathered on the Strip, also took a hit. Javier Barajas said he closed his family's four Mexican restaurants in Las Vegas because members of his staff warned him they would not show up, costing him more than $60,000 in revenue.
"I cannot fire anybody over this, but I would have liked to see some other way to express themselves," said Mr. Barajas, who was once an illegal immigrant from central Mexico but became a United States citizen. "It's the small businesses that are hurt by this."
For many immigrants, however, it was just another workday.
At a Home Depot in Hollywood, day laborers as always crowded parking lot entrances, hoping for work. At a car wash in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, employees buzzed, with workers vacuuming, buffing and drying cars. People lined up at markets, though some reported slower business.
"I was thinking about not buying things, but then I needed to buy stuff," said Alex Sanchez, 28, a construction worker buying an avocado, chilies and beer.
The boycott grew from an idea hatched by a small band of grass-roots advocates in Los Angeles, inspired by the farmworker movement of the 1960's led by Cesar Chavez and Bert Corona. Through the Internet and mass media catering to immigrants, they developed and tapped a network of union organizers, immigrant rights groups and others to spread the word and plan events tied to the boycott, timed to coincide with International Workers' Day.
The Los Angeles organizers said some 70 cities held boycott activities.
The day spawned all manner of supportive actions here. A department store chain offered space for lawyers to give legal advice to immigrants; in Hollywood, the comedian Paul Rodriguez appeared at the comedy club the Laugh Factory to promote a daylong health care fair for immigrant workers.
In Chicago, there was solidarity in diversity, as Latinos were joined by immigrants of Polish, Irish, Asian and African descent. Jerry Jablonski, 30, said he had moved to Chicago from Poland six years ago, flying to Mexico and then crossing the border. He now works a construction job.
"Poland is my old country," Mr. Jablonski said. "This is my new country. I can make everything happen here."