Mayor Enrique Serrano says that the film’s depiction of drug-war violence is out of date and will damage the reputation of a city on the road to recovery

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

The mayor of the Mexican city Ciudad Júarez has called for a boycott of the Hollywood thriller Sicario, saying that the film’s depiction of drug-war violence is out of date and will damage the reputation of a city on the road to recovery.

With images of bodies hanging from bridges and heavily armed police convoys cruising the streets, the film “speaks badly of the city”, said mayor Enrique Serrano.

“Without us denying what’s happened, we have no reason to speak badly of our family when there’s an internal problem,” he told news site Nortedigital.mx.



Serrano had initially threatened to sue the producers for its negative protrayal of the city, which sits across the US border from El Paso, “because there is an effective damage against the community”, he told Forbes. Serrano said he dropped that plan because of high legal costs.

The Ciudad Juárez municipal government did not respond to a request for comment.

Once the homicide capital of the world, with more than 10,000 murders committed between 2008 and 2012, Ciudad Juarez has calmed considerably in recent years.

The city, part of a coveted drug-trafficking corridor into the United States, erupted after the Sinaloa cartel – led by once-again-fugitive Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman – moved in on the territory of the incumbent Juarez cartel, observers say.



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The city has also been the setting for the disappearance and murder of hundreds of women – violence which continued even as thousands of federal police and soldiers were deployed to the city to confront the cartels.

In September, Chihuahua state, which includes Juárez, recorded its lowest levels of homicide since 2007, reported InSight Crime, a foundation studying security in Latin America.

Juárez registered just 17 homicides last month.

Pope Francis revealed in September he had wanted to cross from Ciudad Juárez into El Paso, in an act meant to highlight the plight of migrants. He travelled to Cuba instead after the island country and the United States ended their estrangement.

Sicario – “hit man” in Spanish – wasn’t filmed in Juárez, but stars Emily Blunt and Benecio del Toro as FBI agents working the borderlands as drug violence heats up. The film doesn’t open in Mexico until December, though many in Ciudad Juárez have seen the trailers.

“It’s only a movie” and “an image that’s rather exaggerated”, says Dr Arturo Valenzuela, a local surgeon, who organized physicians and civil society in an attempt to rescue the city.

He previously performed up to four emergency gunshot surgeries in public hospitals during the worst of Juárez’s violence. Now he operates “once every two weeks” on such patients.

El Paso residents have showed some sympathy for Juárez’s cinematic portrayal, though Howard Campbell, an anthropologist at the University of Texas at El Paso, suggested that Serrano’s outrage was misplaced. “Where were the protesters when thousands were being killed in Juárez?”

“The public reaction in Juárez seems to have been orchestrated by the mayor for political ends,” he adds. “I am sure most Juarenses care more about actual violence that has been done to them by drug traffickers and cops than about how that might be depicted in a movie.”