I just read a great Reuters article about the political gains that women are making lately in Latin America, marked by the recent election of the first female president in Chile, but marred by the fact that machismo and sexism and a backlash against independent, strong women is still going on.

Diana Washington Valdez of the El Paso Times reports that yesterday afternoon in downtown Juarez a well-known lawyer was shot and killed. He was lawyer for one of the bus drivers who was falsely arrested and tortured for some of the murders of women there. He mentioned recently that if he is killed he would blame a local police official who'd been harrassing him. Journalists from Spain are in town to report on the murders and were scheduled to interview him soon.

The El Paso paper reports on the current situation with the murders in Ciudad Juarez. Basically there's some improvement, especially on the Chihuahua state level, and no new reports of tortured arrestees, but the murders continue, there were more in 2005 than in 2004, and locally the police and judges are still negligent and/or incompetent.

In June when I was there the count was over 427. It must be over 440 now. Yet I still see newspapers all over the world still using numbers like 300 or 350. Don't any of these writers ever think to themselves "hmm, ongoing problem, so maybe I should see if the number is higher."?

A subcommittee of the U.S. House of Reps has passed a resolution condemning the femicides in Juarez and Chihuahua City. If this goes further and is passed by the whole House and Senate, it could really help. Although it wouldn't be binding legislation, this sort of thing tends to put real pressure on other governments.

According to the Philledelphia Inquirer (remember to use bugmenot.com to log in!), A native of the El Paso-Juarez area has just written a fictionalized account of the Juarez femicides called "Desert Blood: The Juarez Murders". From this review it sounds like a relatively well-done book. This has the same risks as the Hollywood films coming out about the issue, but overall at this point I think that as long as something doesn't completely misrepresent the facts, anything that increases awareness is good.

I'm declaring my Juarez doc to be at "release candidate" stage - In other words, it's done, unless I notice some glaring mistake or glitch. I will sigh a big sigh of relief if i watch it a couple times and don't see something crying out to be fixed.

The last few days have been a haze of waiting for final renders and wandering the industrial wasteland around where the studio is, looking for sustenance while the clouds dump drizzle on the city. Right now i'm waiting for the DVD of the final video to render. It's frustratingly slow to turn a DV file into a muxed mpeg2. I wish I understood why. There's almost nothing slower in my computing world.

If only there was internet at the GAVEL (the studio) then i could while away the waiting getting and sending email, doing other stuff needing to get done. I had to bike over here to the Back to Back cafe where they have a computer, while my laptop sits in the video dungeon working away...

I'm still not quite done with "On The Edge", my documentary about the femicides of Ciudad Juarez, but last weekend I made a trailer for it. I'm not entirely happy with the trailer, and I will probably make a better one soon, but this one I am putting up there just to whet your whistle.

What I was going for was a sort of quick overview of all the different people in the film. But as a friend pointed out it would be better to do an overview of the concepts, the issues involved. Anyway, if you have comments, please leave them here. thanx.

The New York Times published a major story about the murders of women in Ciudad Juarez yesterday. Their focus is on the corruption or incompentence of the police and state government. It's pretty impressive. oh an remember that if you dont have a NYT login and don't want to register, use bugmenot.com

(via jay)

I just found a long article (which I've only skimmed so far) about Amnesty International's recent trip to Juarez and Chihuahua to revisit the femicide situation there and assess if progress is being made. Sounds like they have, and that the new governor is actually visibly better than the old one. Amazing.

I blogged a couple weeks ago about all the movies being produced about Juarez. The El Paso Times has more about that, reactions from people in Juarez and El Paso, and information about a few other films by independant filmmakers from the area. The didn't mention any that were documentaries.

In related news, over the last 4 days I got a lot done on my Juarez film, and finally shortened it to just barely under an hour, though it should be another 2 minutes or so shorter, really. I got a lot done because I was staying alone at a house of some friends that were out of town, so I had no distractions and could borrow space and equipment (monitor, mouse, table, TV, airon chair) to make a little temporary editing workstation. But now I've moved on and I need a new place to work.