New documentary on Guatemala murders
March 8th, 2007 by Zsofia
Canadian filmmaker Giselle Portenier hopes her documentary about the dramatic scale of violence against women in Guatemala will attract international attention, and force the government to act. “Killer’s Paradise” was made as a co-production between the Canadian National Film Board and the BBC, and premieres tonight in Canada.
The documentary has been described as a gripping look at both the epidemic of violence and murder, and the refusal by the goverment to investigate the crimes. The film tells a litany of tragic stories - the opening scene shows the aftermath of a young mother’s murder as she walked down the street with her young children, who wonder, as she lies dead on the road, why “Mommy has fallen asleep on the pavement.”
Since 2001, more than 2,000 women and girls have been murdered in Guatemala, but very few of the killers have been convicted.
“It is happening in other countries as well - Colombia, Peru, Nicaragua, Honduras and of course Mexico, but not to the same extent,” the filmmaker says. “It has a lot to do with the culture of violence that is the legacy of the civil war. They were taught to see women as the enemy; it was a deliberate strategy by the military to rape, torture and kill women and no one was brought to justice for any of that.” Guatemala still has laws in place that allow men to rape women so long as they subsequently marry their victims and the girls are over the age of 12, for example.
Read more about this documentary at the Canadian Press.
