French filmmaker who made documentary on El Salvador’s gangs shot dead

French documentary filmmaker killed in El Salvador

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador — A French filmmaker who spent 16 months documenting the brutality and poverty of an El Salvador street gang has been murdered, a victim of the extreme violence he was trying to bring attention to.

Police say they found the body of Christian Poveda, 53, on Wednesday inside a car in Tonacatepeque, a rural region north of the Salvadoran capital. He had been shot in the head.

“Christian Poveda was a respected journalist; a professional who never hesitated to take great risks in the name of freedom of information,” said French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner.

Poveda, who lived and worked as a filmmaker and photojournalist in El Salvador during the civil war that began in 1980, had recently begun touring with his film “La Vida Loca,” a powerful and disturbing documentary that was receiving widespread recognition.

The film documents the violent phenomenon of gang members who are sent back to El Salvador after serving time in U.S. prisons and who bring their lives of terror with them.

It won the Guadalajara Film Festival Memory Award this spring, and had been selected for the San Sebastian Film Festival, the Morelia Festival in Mexico and the International del Nuevo Cine Latin-American festival in Cuba.

In April, Poveda told the Los Angeles Times that despite the drugs, shootings, beatings and cruelty he captured on the film, he had sympathy for many of the gang members, whom he described as “victims of society.”

He placed the blame for the violent gangs in El Salvador on U.S. policies, and said he “was never afraid of them.”

“As savage as they can be, they’re people of their word. The gangs are very well-structured organizations and the decision made by a gang is the final one. From the moment I understood that, I had no problems,” he said.

Salvadoran Public Safety Minister Manuel Melgar called Poveda’s slaying a “repugnant and reproachable criminal act” and said police would work “tirelessly” to find the killers.

The French ambassador in San Salvador said France would support the Salvadoran investigation.

Reporters Without Borders board member Alain Mingham, a friend of Poveda’s, said the filmmaker had the ability to be committed to and involved with his subjects without taking sides.

The son of Spanish Republicans who sought refuge in France, Poveda reported from Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship, and during the civil wars of the 1980s in Nicaragua and El Salvador, Mingham said.

During his 30-year career, Poveda wrote for a variety of publications including Time and Newsweek magazines, Paris Match and Figaro, from posts in Latin America, Iran and Iraq, Sierra Leone and the Philippines.

“His humanistic convictions went hand-in-hand with a great deal of professional rigor,” Mingham said.

Associated Press Writer Martha Mendoza in Mexico City contributed to this report.