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

www.MexicoReporter.com

This article was written for Index on Censorship.

Photographer and filmmaker Christian Poveda was shot dead in El Salvador Sept. 2, 2009. He spent more than 16 months, every day, with the mara gangs of San Salvador to make the 2009 documentary “La Vida Loca.” This is footage from an interview conducted by the Los Angeles Times’ Deborah Bonello with Poveda a few months before his death. It took place in Mexico City on April 1.

Reuters reports:

Suspected Salvadorean gang members killed French filmmaker Christian Poveda, whose 2008 film “La Vida Loca” crudely depicts the hopeless lives of members of the infamous Mara 18 street gang, local police said on Wednesday.

Poveda, 53, was shot on a road 10 miles north of the capital of San Salvador, as he drove back from filming in La Campanera, a poor, overcrowded suburb and a Mara 18 stronghold.

President Mauricio Funes said in a statement on Wednesday night that he was “shocked” by Poveda’s murder and ordered a thorough investigation.

“La Vida Loca” (The Crazy Life) closely followed the lives of several heavily tattooed gang members, some of whom were jailed or killed during the shooting of the film.

We’ll have more tomorrow, but you can see Poveda talking about his work filming the gangs in an interview I did with him earlier this year.

“La Vida Loca” reflects a depressing and hopeless reality. The documentary, by photojournalist and filmmaker Christian Poveda (you can see his bio here), follows some of the members of ”la dieciocho,” the so-called 18th Street gang in a poor San Salvador neighborhood.

“Little One” is a 19-year-old mother with an enormous “18,” reflecting her membership in the 18th Street gang, tattooed on her face. The numbers stretch from above her eyebrows down onto her cheeks.

“Moreno” is a 25-year-old male member of the same gang who works in a local bakery set up by a nonprofit group called Homies Unidos. The bakery eventually folds when its owner is arrested and sentenced to 16 years in jail on homicide charges.

And “Wizard,” another young mother and gang member, who lost her eye in a fight, is followed by Poveda during a long series of medical consultations and operations to fit her with a replacement glass eye. She’s shot and killed before the end of the film.

Stories like that, punctuated with funerals attended by silent, heavily tattooed male gang members and wailing young wives, mothers and girlfriends, make up the sum of “La Vida Loca.”

The nature of their existence meant that Poveda had to spread his camera lens wide in the 16 months he spent shooting the film.

“I knew right from the start that I couldn’t film just one character,” he explains during an interview on a trip to Mexico last month when “La Vida Loca” was part of the Guadalajara International Film Festival.

“Firstly, they get bored after a couple of months and don’t want to be filmed anymore. Or two, they get put in jail, or they get killed.”

That’s a reality that Poveda feels a lot of Americans don’t know about and should.

“Americans have to realize how much damage the U.S. has done to this region,” he says.

Poveda, who lives in San Salvador and has worked as a photojournalist covering the country before, during and after the 12-year-long civil war that began in 1980, is talking from experience.

The current situation in El Salvador is one of the less-inspiring examples of the long-standing social and economic ties between the United States and Latin American countries, he argues.

Gangs were formed by Salvadorans living on the streets of Los Angeles in the 1980s. When the peace accords that ended the civil 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 U.S. authorities. Many were sent back after completing prison sentences.

As Rocky Delgadillo, a Los Angeles city attorney, notes in this column for the L.A. Times, “this only exacerbated the problem, spreading gangs like a virus until they grew into transnational `super-gangs’.”

Poverty and a lack of opportunities in post-war El Salvador made the country a ripe recruiting ground.

But gangs did exist in El Salvador before that. Tracy Wilkinson noted in her 1994 report on the issue for the L.A. Times:

However, it was after the United States began implementing their deportation policy in the 1990s that the groups grew into the super-gangs that they are today, with cliques all the way through Central America and Mexico as well as, of course, a huge presence in the U.S.

Speaking at the Mexico City premiere of “La Vida Loca” last month, Poveda said officials estimate there are 15,000 gang members in El Salvador; 14,000 in Guatemala; 35,000 in Honduras; and 5,000 in Mexico.

The biggest population of gang members still resides in the U.S., with an estimated 70,000 living there, he said.

As far as Poveda is concerned, the vast majority of the gang members in El Salvador are “victims of society, of our society. ” A desperate reaction to a desperate situation.

Many would disagree. The brutally violent groups have been connected with organized crime and other illegal activities. Here in Mexico, they’re one of the parties blamed for the high levels of violent attacks and robberies against migrants traveling from Central America and heading north to the United States.

But Poveda says that their big, bad image makes them an easy target and a convenient scapegoat for crimes difficult for governments to control. He also differentiates between gang members living in the United States and those living in El Salvador.

“They live in completely different economic situations,” he says.

“It’s not the same thing selling drugs in the central market of San Salvador as it is selling drugs on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles,” he says, referring to the kind of profits gang members make in the two places.

When asked if he can see a day when the gangs cease to exist, Poveda says that the destruction of the networks is not the point.

“If you want to improve things, the first thing to know is that it’s not about making the gangs disappear. They need to be given another focus.”

At the time of interviewing Poveda, he had yet to secure a distribution deal for “La Vida Loca” in the U.S. The documentary opens on cinema screens here in Mexico on May 15.

– Deborah Bonello in Mexico City for La Plaza

Click here to see Poveda’s images on Flickr.