A controversial French filmmaker who documented gang life in El Salvador has been shot dead.
Christian Poveda, 52, was found with a gunshot wound to his head in a car just north of the capital San Salvador on Wednesday (02Sep09).
Poveda’s 2008 film La Vida Loca (The Crazy Life) followed the violent lives of members of the Mara 18 street gang and even showed disturbing images of gang members shot to death in the streets with relatives crying over coffins.
Police say that Poveda was driving back from filming in La Campanera, an overcrowded ghetto that is a stronghold of the Mara 18 gang, when he was apparently ambushed.
Gangsters are suspected to be behind the killing, according to Britain’s The Times Online.
Poveda first came to El Salvador as a photographer in the 1980s to cover its civil war and returned in the 1990s to focus on the Central American country’s street gangs.
El Salvador’s President Mauricio Funes said in a statement he was “shocked” by Poveda’s murder and has ordered a thorough investigation into his killing.
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