Missing Young Woman

In the maquiladora town of Ciudad Juárez, just across the border from El Paso, Texas, between 200 and 400 Mexican women have disappeared in the past decade. Sometimes their bodies turn up in the desert - sometimes in clothes not their own, sometimes dismembered and bearing signs of torture and ritual sacrifice. The authorities have reacted at best with a mixture of silence and incompetence. An Egyptian national has been arrested, but as the killings have continued, the authorities insist he now masterminds the abductions from his prison cell. Other suspects have included bus drivers, a motorbike gang, Texans unknown, organised drug traffickers - and the police themselves, who have been indicted for sexual molestation and worse in elaborate and harrowing testimony from one of this film's few witnesses. The lack of answers adds a piercing chill to this forsaken story.