Documentary Filmmaker Christian Poveda Shot Dead In El Salvador
SAN SALVADOR (September 2, 2009) – French filmmaker Christian Poveda, 53, has been shot to death north of San Salvador as he traveled back to the capital city after a day of filming in La Campanera on Wednesday, local police told Reuters.
Poveda was shot in the head by suspected Salvadoran gang members, officials said, on a road about 10 miles outside of the capital in the municipality of Tonacatepeque. The community is located on Highway 1 northeast of San Salvador.
Poveda was driving back from La Campanera, an overcrowded ghetto that is a stronghold of the Mara 18 gang, when he was apparently ambushed, The Times reported from London. Poveda's body was discovered in a car in the poor, rural area.
Journalists in Central America have told friends in the States tonight that so far police in San Salvador do not have any concrete leads on Poveda's killers.
In a statement, El Salvador's president, Mauricio Funes, said he was "devastated" by news of the Poveda's murder and ordered an immediate investigation. Himself a former journalist, Funes had met Poveda to discuss the growing problem of gang violence.
His 2008 film about the Mara 18 street gang called "La Vida Loca" (The Crazy Life) is about the hopeless lives of some of the more than 30,000 Salvadoran gang members, some who were jailed or killed during the filming. The movie was critical of how police crack down on the gangs, mostly young people who were driven to crime by abject poverty, and it explains how the Salvadoran gangs model themselves after Los Angeles street gangs.
Many current Central American gang members are where they are today because they've been deported from the United States after serving prison terms in America.
"Christian Poveda’s loss is a profound wound for Salvadoran journalists, especially the young photographers he influenced and nurtured," photojournalist and University of Texas photojournalism professor Donna DeCesare told News Photographer magazine tonight. DeCesare's documentary work in Central America also focuses on some of San Salvador's social and crime-related problems.
"I never met Poveda but we shared common concerns if different approaches to them. We both covered the Civil War in El Salvador and later became concerned about the impact of gangs in Salvadoran society. This terrible crime illustrates the reality that working class Salvadorans live daily — a homicide rate in their barrios that's higher than during the war. If this crime remains another unsolved Salvadoran murder, the cost to Salvadoran journalism and to the faith in change engendered by the recent elections there will be devastating."
Poveda's film received widespread attention in El Salvador as it showed gang members shot to death in the streets, heavily tattooed female gang members, and families crying over the coffins of their slain children.
He first traveled to El Salvador as a Time magazine photographer in the 1980s, and since the 1990s he has concentrated his work on documentary coverage of Salvadoran gangs. The journalist had also covered the conflicts in Iraq, Lebanon, and Iran, and his photographs have been distributed by Sipa Press, Keystone, VU and Corbis.
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