More arrests in Poveda murder case

More than three months after the murder of French journalist Christian Poveda, police have arrested 10 more gang members for the crime. Poveda's most recent work was the documentary La Vida Loca, an unflinching portrait of youths caught up in El Salvador's gang culture, and the release of that film appears to have prompted the killing. According to an AP story:

"The information we have is that some gang members did not approve of the way it (the documentary) was done, and the way it was shown," [police commissioner Augusto] Cotto told a news conference.

What they didn't like, he said, was the fact that "in the documentary they were put out in public, their illegal acts were made public, the consumption of drugs, that increased a leadership struggle in the gang ... that had already been under way for a long time."...

He said police officer Jose Napoleon Espinoza — who allegedly collaborated with gang members and received money from extortion schemes — had told the Mara 18 that Poveda was giving police information on the gang, something Cotto said "is totally false."

The day he was killed, Poveda set out to visit the gang-dominated Soyapango area to arrange an interview with female gang members for journalists from a French fashion magazine.

The suspects allegedly decided to kill the filmmaker.

La Prensa Grafica has a longer article purporting to describe more of the gang members planning of the murder of the filmmaker they had allowed to live among them for more than a year.