Israel Ticas is the only criminologist working in one of Latin America’s most
dangerous countries: El Salvador. He’s made it his mission to find the hundreds of
missing teenagers who have fallen victim to the country’s brutal gang conflict.The
mothers of the missing affectionately call Ticas The Engineer, for his forensic
skills in uncovering their loved ones. But for The Engineer, death no longer
evokes fear. Death is his every day; it has become his art. He calls the bodies
he finds “friends” and his office walls are a macabre tribute to them all.
The Engineer speaks of a generation of child murderers, or “delinquents.”
With unprecedented access into a juvenile detention centre, these teenage
inmates recount their first kill. Some were as young as eight when they
committed their first murder. Killing rival gangsters has become an initiation
test. The choice is simple: kill or be killed, they explain.
In an effort to reduce child-on-child violence, the State and Catholic Church in
El Salvador has recently brokered an unstable truce between the country’s
rival gangs. But will the let-up in the violence allow the hundreds still
missing to be found? Will the murderers come forward and reveal the
hundreds of secret mass graves still yet to be investigated?
Sergeant Jonny is from El Salvador’s élite anti-gang unit and an old friend of
The Engineer. He says the truce is not real. He explains how officially the
murder rate has dropped, but the statistics fail to account for the rise in the
number of disappearances. “Gangs continue to kill. Just in secret,” says Jonny.
During the civil war, Ticas and Sergeant Jonny fought the guerrillas. Now
once again they’re on the front line.
The Engineer has never been busier. Usually his victims have been buried in graves for monts. Sometimes even years. But more and more he’s unearthing
“frescitos” – fresh bodies that have spent less than a few days underground:
“If the murders have stopped, why am I seeing more and more of them?” he
asks.
Rodrigo is 18. He’s in witness protection. Caught in possession of a gun, the
authorities dropped the charges against him in return for information on the
murders his gang has committed. He says the truce is not real. He says his
leaders agreed to it in return for financial benefits and other rewards. Leading
police to unmarked graves, he explains how gangs continue to murder, “The
first time is scary. But now I kill to make me feel better.”
The Engineer has become a target. “They’d love to bury you,” Rodrigo warns.
The threat disturbs Ticas for only a short while. For him, the important thing
is to resume his work and find peace for the grieving mothers who say that
apart from God, he’s the only person they can rely on to find their child.
The history of Israel Ticas is at the center of the documentary "El Ingeniero," directed by Juan Passarelli and Mathew Charles, who was screened in Naples, during the festival cinema of human rights: the first independent Guatemalan journalist, former BBC reporter the second, Passarelli has investigated the merchants of sex in South Africa and the desperate of London.
Together Passarelli and Charles have created the production company "Guerrilla Pictures" which not only has the ambition to make good movies: "We believe that documentaries can change the world," they write on their site. And to believe in their films were excellent advisors and sponsors such as American documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, who along with Glenn Greenwald was approached by Edward Snowden and received top secret files on the NSA. But above all, the film was funded in part by WikiLeaks, which has always been active in Latin America. "Here's the real global economy," said Julian Assange, on the occasion of the preview of the film in London, "cocaine at bargain prices for the noses of Hollywood and mountains of corpses in mass graves unnamed in El Salvador.
http://www.guerrillapictures.tv/ Film_Stills
http://www.guerrillapictures.tv/http://www.guerrillapictures.tv/
http://www.guerrillapictures.tv/
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento