Back in May 2008, U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials rounded up 389 undocumented workers in the Agriprocessors Inc. kosher meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa. The raid was the largest in U.S history.

Two weeks later, filmmakers Jennifer Szymaszek and Greg Brosnan started filming “In the Shadow of the Raid,” a documentary film showing at the Morelia International Film Festival in Mexico. A 15-minute edit of the film was recently broadcast on PBS “Frontline’s” website.

“In the Shadow of the Raid” delves into the consequences of the ICE raid for Postville and for some of the the migrants who were arrested and deported back to their homes in two rural villages in Guatemala.

Following the closure of the meatpacking plant, Postville businesses failed and livelihoods were destroyed.

In Guatemala, migrant Willian Toj returned to his wife and parents. Awaiting him was a massive debt that he accrued from his trip to the U.S. He had been working in the Postville plant for 20 minutes before the ICE raid.

Toj can barely earn enough to pay the monthly interest on the $7,000 debt, let alone get the funds to treat his mother’s worsening cancer.

The tone of the documentary is observational rather than preachy, in the same vein as other recent works such as “Los Que Se Quedan / Those Who Remain.” The filmmakers try to reflect some of the realities that contribute to why so many Central Americans and Mexicans head to the United States. But there are no ICE officials interviewed, no legal redresses sought. Brosnan and Szymaszek focus on the people affected by the raid, and the resulting film is a photographic testament to a sad reality.

Watch the video for more.

– Deborah Bonello in Mexico City for the Los Angeles Times.

Video: An interview with Jennifer Szymaszek and Greg Brosnan, directors of “In the Shadow of the Raid.” All non-interview material courtesy of Szymaszek and Brosnan. Video interview by Deborah Bonello.

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.

For Mexico, which prides itself on a unique artistic tradition, the crisis resulting from the global economic meltdown and swine flu is particularly acute, and is being felt by the country’s artistic community and museums.

See this report by for more.

– Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

Image: A model of a jaguar is part of a public art installation on Mexico City’s Avenida de la Reforma. Deborah Bonello / Los Angeles Times.

Spend any time on the streets of Mexico, and you will eventually see them. Mexico’s hairless brown or red-skinned dogs — the Xoloitzcuintle (pronounced sholo-squint-lay).

Love them or hate them, they’ve played a long-term part in Mexico’s history, according to Gabriel Mestre, who is a small-scale Xoloitzcuintle breeder and author of a number of books on the subject. He says this breed of dog can be traced back at least 2,800 years in Mexico, and that some Mexicans believed that the animals had curative powers.

Not all Xoloitzcuintle dogs are bald, and litters yield hairy and hairless pups. But it’s the hairless dogs that tend to attract more attention, Mestre says.

He sells most of his dogs and puppies to other breeders in Europe, and says the reactions he gets when he takes his dogs out onto the streets here in Mexico City are mixed. Some people compliment him, others shy away. Mestre’s client base does suggest that the unusual looking animals are an acquired taste and are more popular with foreign than domestic breeders.

But that doesn’t stop him from showing them off, and he’s a regular at national and international dog shows around the world. We went along with him and one of his dogs, 8-month-old Aztlan, to a recent show here in Mexico City.

Watch the video for more.

– Deborah Bonello in Mexico City for the Los Angeles Times

Video: Mexico’s hairless Xoloitzcuintle in competition. Credit: Deborah Bonello

Mexico City’s Michael Jackson fans got together Tuesday morning to practice the recently deceased singer’s famous “Thriller” dance in front of the Palacio de Bellas Artes downtown.

Led by Mexican Jackson impersonator “Héctor Jackson” (pictured) and choreographer Adolfo Chávez, the group was preparing for an Aug. 29 event in which an estimated 11,000 people in Mexico City will attempt to break the Guinness World Record for the biggest mass “Thriller” dance. Jackson would have turned 51 on that date.

Jackson holds numerous Guinness World Records including the most Grammy Awards won in a year, most hit singles on the British charts in a year, bestselling album of all time (“Thriller”), longest span of No. 1 hits by an R&B artist, bestselling music video, highest annual earnings for a pop star, and most successful pop music family, according to the organization’s website.

Fans in other cities around the world, including Moscow and Barcelona, are expected to take part in the attempt to break the record, held by a group from Toronto.

Click here for more pictures on Flickr.

– Deborah Bonello in Mexico City for the Los Angeles Times.

Photo credit: Mexico City government.

To some, the graffiti that covers miles of walls and public spaces across Mexico City is a thing of beauty and something to be encouraged and celebrated. To others, such as the local government’s Youth Institute, it’s an ugly nuisance.

A government project mobilized more than 1,000 youngsters earlier this month to clean up and repaint a graffiti-covered wall in the south of the city, as part of an urban spruce-up scheme for the summer.

See the video for more.

– Deborah Bonello in Mexico City for the Los Angeles Times.

Video: The Mexico City government recruited more than 1,000 young people in this to make over a graffiti-covered wall in the south of the city. Credit: Deborah Bonello / Los Angeles Times

A T-shirt for sale outside Mexico City’s Stadium Azteca yesterday afternoon, during a World Cup qualifying match between the U.S and Mexico, which Mexico won 2:1.

“Toma” means “take”, or in this instance, “take this”.

More photos here on Flickr.