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 Entertainment | September 2007 
Bordertown: Changing the World a Little
 Mindy Ran - Expatica
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Based on fact, the newly released Bordertown is a film about the bizarre murders of over 400 young women in the Mexican town of Juarez. One of the victims happened to be a Dutch tourist and her mother hopes the film will raise awareness further so that something can be done about bringing the killers to justice and preventing more lives being taken.
Arsene van Nierop was only able to sit through film once or twice. The film: Bordertown, staring Jennifer Lopez and Antonio Banderes, which opens in the Netherlands this week. The reason: the gritty dramatization of the real-life events around the brutal, unsolved, rape/murders of over 400 women in Juarez, Mexico remind her too graphically of the fate of the only European women included in those numbers, her daughter Hester.
Separating fact from fiction
“It was really shocking to see the film because I recognised it,” says Mrs van Nierop. “I thought, this is the true situation. This is not just a Hollywood film, it’s a reality film. I could feel what my daughter must have felt.”
Hester van Nierop had just graduated from an Architecture course in 1998 and wanted to take some time to travel. She decided to go visit her sister, working in Mexico. Their parents decided it would be a great family holiday and spent a week with their daughters.
At the end of the holiday, they put Hester on a bus heading towards the US, and went south to Mexico City to return to the Netherlands. They had only just arrived home when the police were at their door to inform them that Hester had been beaten unconscious, raped, murdered and left in a hotel room.
“Hester went to the wrong place, met the wrong man and went to a hotel with him,” says Mrs. Van Nierop. “She was beaten unconscious; she was used, strangled and left naked under the bed. The woman who was cleaning the hotel found Hester and called the police. She wasn’t missing because he threw her passport and identity papers out of the window and they found them. Happily; we did not have to look for her for months and months.”
Jennifer Lopez as the journalist
“Happily” might seem a strange choice of words, but one of the most haunting, and repetitive scenes in the film ‘Bordertown’ is that of the mothers of Juarez out in the desert with sticks, poking them through the thin layer of sand to find the bodies of their daughters, shallowly buried underneath.
The plot of Bordertown focuses on one story of a young Mexican survivor to highlight and explore the horrifying real life events over the past 10 years or so. Lauren Fredericks (played by Jennifer Lopez) is an ambitious journalist sent to cover the slowly emerging stories of hundreds of young women found raped, murdered and buried in the desert sands around Juarez, Mexico, a bordertown with the US.
Most of the young women work in the Maquiladoras, which are factories that have sprung up over the border as a result of the “North American Freetrade Agreement” between the US and Mexico, and provide shockingly cheap labour to produce goods for the American market.
Once in Juarez, Lauren asks for the aide of an old colleague and local newspaper editor, Diaz (played by Antonio Banderas) and is soon swept up in trying to protect and expose the would-be murderers of the only survivor, 16 year old Eva (played by Maya Zapata).
While Bordertown is a both a great film, and a great vehicle to increase awareness, it is difficult to know what is fact, and what is fiction. Director of the film, Gregory Nava, based Bordertown on meetings with Amnesty International and news reports of the huge numbers of unsolved murders, almost always occurring to young women working in the Maquiladoras, and living in extreme poverty in the surrounding desert.
The victims were usually attacked while riding the buses used to transport workers to and from the factories. Some of these buses run late into the night and stop in dark and dangerous places. To date, while there are wild speculations as to who is behind the murders, such as the sons of the rich out to rape and murder for sport, to bus drivers taking advantage of the lack of action of the government, not a single case has been brought – including that of Hester van Nierop.
The Governments ‘blind eye’
“They know his name and the place where he was living,” says Mrs. Van Nierop. “There are several witnesses who saw him afterwards, but the police did not look for him. They knew who it was immediately after Hester’s murder because the man was in the hotel for three days. They could make very nice composite pictures of him, but they waited and waited.”
Now, nine years later, the government of Mexico has finally sent out these composites to all of the states of the country, including the name of the man they claim is wanted for Hester’s murder. “They waited nine years to send this,” says Mrs van Nierop. “I am glad they did, but it is not enough.”
Wrong place wrong time or part of a ‘feminicide’?
It took five years before Mrs van Nierop could speak out about her daughter’s murder. She felt it should be a private grief. It was the publication of an in-depth report on the murders and disappearance of the young women of Juarez by Amnesty International in 2003 that changed her mind.
“In the first moments you think, okay my daughter was in the wrong place, that it was an individual murder,” she continues. “And then, you find she is one of 400 women. And, they don’t mention the women who have disappeared. Disappearance is not a crime, and the police do nothing about it. They say they have simply crossed the border, but these women have been murdered.
I feel responsible to all the women who are murdered there. My daughter Hester was such a kind, energetic, spontaneous and splendid woman. It is not possible she died for nothing. Now I can fight against the murders of Juarez, because I am fighting with my daughter Hester.”
Casa Amiga
She decided to go to Mexico, to see and understand what had happened to her daughter firsthand. After some research, she discovered a woman named Esther Chavez who was running a shelter called ‘Casa Amiga’ to help and support the grieving mothers of Juarez. Chavez told her; “you are one of us”, and invited Mrs van Nierop to Juarez in 2004.
“It was the first time I could see the poverty of the women,” explains Mrs van Nierop. “I felt the horrible atmosphere in the city of Juarez. I saw the difference between the rich people who live there and the poor. The rich people live in castles and the poor live in the desert in houses of paper.”
“When I saw this, I understood it was impossible for the women to join together to support each other. I thought they need help from abroad, it’s easier for me to cry and speak out about this criminal situation than for the women there.”
Stichting Hester
In 2005, she started the Stichting Hester, which pays for a psychologist for Casa Amiga to help the grieving women, and a behavioural therapist specialised in children to help spot siblings who are traumatised or suffering from abuse, incest, violence or witnesses to violence and need help.
Mrs van Nierop hopes that when the issue returns to the European Parliament this fall, with the pressure by Amnesty International and the additional awareness created by the film that the Mexican government will finally do something to halt what she refers to as “feminicide”.
“I think the government wants to change the situation,” she says, “but they want to change it because it creates a bad image. They want to change it through words, but they have to change the culture, the corruption, the way they prosecute murderers, the whole situation in Juarez before the murders will stop.”
“Together, I hope we can change the world a little bit.”
Mindy Ran is a freelance writer based in the Netherlands. |
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