Hollywood joins search for answers in mystery of Juarez mass murder

The killings began 13 years ago and the death toll is still rising. So far 400 young women have been murdered and their bodies dumped along the Texas-Mexico border near Ciudad Juarez. Many of them had been mutilated, tortured and raped. The crimes, known as the maquiladora murders because some of the victims worked in the city's factories, known as maquiladoras, have never been solved.

Now Hollywood has entered the picture. Two films set against the backdrop of the killings are soon to be released. One, The Virgin Of Juarez, stars Minnie Driver and is already playing the festival circuit. Bordertown, an action-thriller with Jennifer Lopez, is in post-production.

Outrage over the murders has inspired dozens of artists in the United States and Mexico to paint pictures, write books, record songs and produce television docu-dramas about the killings. Most of the projects are aimed at prodding the Mexican authorities into action.

An estimated 800 more women are missing and for years the Mexican authorities did little or nothing to investigate. As the bodies continue to turn up so have a host of theories. Satanists, organ harvesters and drug cartels have been among the suspects as well as the sons of wealthy men, who, it has been rumoured, hunt and kill women for sport. The only consensus is that a phenomenon once attributed to a single serial killer has become a wider crime wave involving multiple murderers.

Bonnie Abaunza, director of Artists for Amnesty, a programme of Amnesty International which has been monitoring the killings, said: "Artists are using their tools to produce very disturbing and powerful images. They are sending a clear signal to those perpetrating the violence that people this side of the border do care."

A British-born filmmaker, Kevin James Dobson, raised £750,000 to make The Virgin Of Juarez, a film he has written, produced and directed and which stars Minnie Driver as a journalist investigating the killings.

Dobson first became aware of the Juarez killings while researching the Moors murders, a subject that haunted him while he was growing up in Manchester. "Reading and hearing about what Ian Brady and Myra Hindley did simply terrified me," he recalled. "Then three years ago I was reading about it on the internet and there was a link to serial killings and I read about these murders in Juarez - hundreds of them. I became haunted by the same feelings I had had as a child with the Moors murders. It re-awoke all those demons and kept them alive." Driver's journalist character goes to Juarez to investigate the killings and meets a survivor of a vicious attack whose mysterious weeping wounds are the catalyst for the drama. "I believe that if you shine a light on evil it creeps back into its corner," said Dobson.

Bordertown, which cost about £25m, is also about a female reporter, played by Lopez, who befriends a victim. Written and directed by Gregory Nava, who previously teamed with Lopez on Selena, Bordertown points to a group of bus drivers as the culprits, a theory that has since been discounted.

Artists for Amnesty read and approved both scripts, although the organisation has refused to give approval and assistance to three other film projects which Ms Abaunza said were simply about making money. "They were violent thrillers with the theme of the more blood, the better," she said.