The Red Note team talks with Mural.com about the podcast's investigation of Mexico's femicide crisis
Last week, The Red Note director Craig Whitney and producer Estefania Bonilla Hernandez spoke with the Grupo Reforma publication Mural.com about the podcast's investigation of the ongoing femicide crisis in Mexico.
You can read the complete English translation of Mural.com's interview with Craig and Estefania below the line break in this post.
Click on the following link to read the original Spanish version of the article on Mural.com's website: Podcast para escuchar desde el dolor
Podcast to listen from pain
By Alejandra Carrillo |Mural
It is true that at some point in the most critical increase in violence in the country, Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua was one of the most dangerous cities in the world. For women, at least.
This is the story told by the bilingual podcast "La Nota Roja", which premiered at the end of last year. It was hosted by Lydia Cacho and produced by the Imperative Entertainment production company with the collaboration of several high-level Mexican and American journalists and sound engineers.
Estefanía Bonilla and Craig Whitney, producer and director of the podcast, said that although the project was originally intended for a film, the possibilities of the podcast offered them a format to explore in depth and permanently record a subject that marked the border and its two biggest cities.
"We found it very exciting. The script for the feature film that we had in mind has hundreds of pages of research, we could not explore 28 years of violence in Juárez in a 100-minute feature film. It was an opportunity to release all the information and to observe the story in a different way, from the voices of the families and other experts we talked to during production," Craig said about it.
Specialists from Chihuahua and the United States, government officials and families who continue to seek justice for their daughters in this phenomenon are part of this investigation.
"The project arrives in the social situation of the Country at this time, because it would not have had the same impact if it had been at some other time. Families are being listened to, the media are making these terrible cases known from the people who they have lived in their own flesh, which has been disheartening," Estefanía Bonilla said about it.
Not re-victimizing, listening to the mothers, fathers and children who survive the victims of Juárez has been a pillar of the ethical and aesthetic stance in the project that is narrated since today. Being a complex story, which has not ended but has spread to the entire Country.
"It is crucial to continue with this conversation, with a political, economic and social problem like this one and to speak about it with a horizontal narrative that calls for awakening and raising awareness," said Bonilla.
"As we speak, two women in the film world are missing, Wendy Sánchez and Mitzi Cruz Gutiérrez. This cannot continue to happen. That is why it is very important to continue talking about this until there is no point in continuing to do so because all the cases have been resolved. It is still happening, and almost 90 percent of the cases in Juárez remain in impunity."
The Award
The 2021 iHeartRadio Podcast Awards will air on Thursday, January 21, 2021. It is one of the most important awards in the United States. "La Nota Roja" is nominated as the best podcast in Spanish of 2020, along with the Duolingo Spanish Podcast, "Leyendas Legendarias" and the self-improvement program "Spanish Aqui Presents".
Listen To It
The Red Note and its English version can be found on Spotify, Audible and the Apple Podcast. It has 10 episodes and is narrated by award-winning journalist and author Lydia Cacho.