MEXICO CITY – “How does it feel to kill?” filmmaker Alejandra Sánchez asks former assassin Gabriela López.
“Nothing,” replies the 43-year-old woman, who worked for a drug smuggling cell in the north of the country, automatically. “It’s a job. I did my job and we went to Jacal to eat hamburgers.”
With such frankness and naturalness, in Placeada, Historia íntima de una ex sicaria (2022), currently showing in the cinemas of the Cineteca Nacional, López narrates different periods of her criminal life, starting with the backgrounds that led her to it and even that way when in the end it came out.
“It is the intimate testimony of a woman from (Ciudad) Juárez who was a hitman and who, at a very difficult age, namely puberty, began to engage in criminal activity as a hitman. Gaby joined organized crime at the age of 20 “12 years old and operated until he was 20 when he was accused of several murders,” says Sánchez (Chihuahua, 1973) in an interview.
“It’s the narration of a woman telling us (her story) out loud and very close because that was part of the relationship I developed with her over four or five years,” the documentary filmmaker continues. “They came to different hotel rooms in Mexico City to work on this statement.”
López, who was marred by domestic violence as a child, recalls recalling the “crude morals” that prompted his first murder – “What was I getting into? obeyed orders given to him by a powerful figure in a maximum security prison to execute two people: “I want them dead and I want their heads.”
“Because of those deaths, I became a commander,” says the documentary’s former hitman, who was trained at rifle ranges and has even traveled to Spain, Morocco and Israel. “They teach you what torture is there. A lot.”
From tears remembering the death of Ana, her teenage friend with whom she started selling marijuana and eventually joining the drug lords of Ciudad Juárez, to laughing at her spectacular arrest in a major operation in Acapulco, the film is moving between human emotions The woman was sentenced to 40 years in prison and released after almost 20 years.
“I tried to place the narrative from a different place that isn’t necessarily the journalistic one. I think journalists do a great job, but cinema is about telling stories. And just to tell stories, you have to understand. ‘Life from another dimension,’ comments the filmmaker, emphasizing both the lack of apologetic intent and the fact that she couldn’t become a ‘prosecutor’.
“My intention was to understand why a woman, even a woman as young as 12, would be seduced by organized crime – because there is a kind of seduction -” he notes. “What are the conditions for characters like Gabriela to exist in this country to this day? It’s a story that happened in the ’90s, but in this second decade of the 2000th century, hundreds or thousands of boys and girls are co-opting the crime.
Sánchez has been interested in the phenomenon of violence for several years and does not forget what human rights specialist Jacobo Dayán replied one day when asked why there are so many deaths in the country: “Because death is a business in Mexico; each dead person represents pesos and “cents,” the scientist explained.
So the filmmaker set herself the task of understanding what could be behind this situation from the perspective of a young woman. She searched unsuccessfully at a rehabilitation center for juvenile delinquents in Chihuahua, where custody eventually contacted López, whose story did not leave audiences indifferent.
“What happens to a lot of viewers is that they realize that Gabriela has more in common with regular citizens with whom we don’t focus on pulling triggers. She has dreams, desires; she has fantasies – which I’m sure the vast majority of residents have.” Part of this planet – having a house on the beach.
“And maybe we’ll find out there, and that’s very destabilizing, that we’re more like her than we’d like,” stresses Sánchez, who to his surprise has seen people infected by the humor of the former assassin. “The laughter in public suddenly upset me because we are talking about heinous crimes or very sad situations. The public takes this cynicism well.”
In the end, the filmmaker hopes it will tell the story of López, who after an accident and working in prison as a placeada – a position in the cartel – is reunited with her three children and makes a living selling flour tortillas earned , can help to overcome the difficult situation in Mexico.
“It’s a film made with a desire to work with another society, with a desire to reach out the hand of reconciliation and one day not have Gabrielas in the society anymore.”
“Perhaps you are beginning to understand life from the bonds of love and abundance. I don’t want to sound cheesy because it’s very complex,” he continues. “I think that there is a responsibility of the state to also offer different options to children, families and communities; to offer them spaces other than crime.”
But where does evil begin?
López, the injured young woman who longed to light the stove and let her entire family die, was also able to feel compassion and spare the life of the girlfriend of a capo she had to execute.
This is part of the chiaroscuro seen in the documentary by Sánchez, who also directed Bajo Juárez: The City Devours Her Daughters (2006), co-directed by José Antonio Cordero, and Agnus Dei: Cordero de Dios (2011 ).
Do you recognize in the assassination a kind of banality of evil, as Hannah Arendt imagined it?
It’s a whole philosophical dissertation where evil begins; Is it an integral part of human beings? Or is it part of the context?
I guess I’m one of those people who think context matters. Maybe Gabriela wouldn’t have had the father she had – she says so herself – (the story would be different). Without concessions or justifications, because there are those who have perhaps even worse fathers and do not take this path. I dare say that there is drug trafficking in every country in the world, but it is not as devastating nor as violent as in Mexico.
Therefore, the documentarist is of the opinion that different living conditions may also lead to a different civic construction.
“And therefore different citizens and with less violence,” he says. “So I believe that it is a social, individual and state responsibility.”
Does the “hugs not bullets” strategy meet such a need?
You see, I think this government can take a lot of criticism. It’s not a sentence I agree with; It seems to me more like a political slogan than reality. But I believe that this government, on the other hand, has tried to open social programs that are necessary to be able to build different societies.
But I think he’s also carrying on with the same debt as the rest of his predecessors in previous governments, because there are a number of deaths that show that perhaps the strategy hasn’t been implemented, on the one hand right and necessary, and on the other hand it has a Legacy of corruption and mismanagement in the administration of justice, which is also struggling … The analysis goes much deeper.