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Extreme Frontiers, The Deadly Gap

Extreme Frontiers, The Deadly Gap

Season 2: Zulia

Format: documentary series

Duration: 8 x 45 min

Target: 18+

Original language: Spanish. 

Seasons: 1

Locations: Colombia, Venezuela.

Themes: Social. Research.

Original idea: Simone Bruno.

Venezuela and Colombia share 2,200 kilometers of border that separate a country in economic collapse and the largest producer of cocaine in the world. It is also the border that separates two worlds: socialism on one side and capitalism on the other, like a modern iron curtain in Latin America; an ideological, political, geographical and military border where all the different armed groups of the two countries dispute.

 

Millions of Venezuelans have crossed illegally in recent years to seek luck in Colombia and other South American countries. Meanwhile tons of coca enter Venezuela in one of the new drug trafficking routes to the US and Europe. For this reason, the 2,200 km have become war zones where armed groups fight for control of the trails/illegal trade routes between the two countries. Recent studies show that the "ownership" of these trails is one of the most lucrative businesses in Latin America today.


This series will take us to know the war of "property over the cocaine routes" between the ELN guerrillas that work on both sides of the border, the paramilitary groups of the Rastrojos and the Clan del Golfo, the dissidence of the guerrilla of the FARC -every day more powerful-, on the Venezuelan side the Chavista combos often supported by the Venezuelan Guard. And the situation that, thanks to this, the native communities of the regions and the Venezuelan immigrants live in, who have been stuck on the extensive border, imprisoned by the power of these criminal armies that use them for their service by cultivating/scraping coca, smuggling gasoline/chemicals and coyotes. who exploit them economically and sexually.

 

We will go to the Catatumbo region, where the coca that is taken to Venezuela by the ELN guerrillas is produced. We will meet the coyotes and smugglers who went from smuggling gasoline from Venezuela to trafficking migrants. And those migrants who managed to escape their clutches, forming cambuches around the surrounding cities, considered sources of contamination and schools of crime.

The Machine of Death

A Simone Bruno project

Format: documentary

Genre: Unitary Social

Towards the end of 2008, a group of mothers from Soacha, a working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of Bogotá, went  in search of their children, all of whom had disappeared on the same day. A few days later they were found dead and buried in a mass grave 600 kilometers away and declared guerrillas killed in combat according to the national army. 

 

Insults that made the mothers unite and investigate, finding day after day dozens of similar cases throughout the country: young people with low economic resources, recruited with a false job offer, taken to rural areas where they were killed and passed as "positive" (military term that refers to the guerrillas discharged).

"The death machine" reconstructs the investigation of the Mothers of Soacha in search of their children, False Positives. And the result of this investigation, which revealed a system of rewards for the extermination of innocents causing the fall of the highest command of the Colombian army.

 

We will relive their protests, the social mobilization that managed to unite an outraged society in search of answers, the official investigation by the prosecution and forensic scientists, the testimonies of civilian witnesses, many of them young naively involved in the chain of extermination. We will hear the confessions of accused soldiers, who murdered innocents to earn rewards and be able to travel home to celebrate Mother's Day or visit their girlfriends on Valentine's Day. And of great generals and leaders fulfilling their duty in the fight against the guerrillas.

 

How did the Machiavellian system come to be devised? How was this death machine stopped? And how, the heart of a mother without forgetting, is able to understand and forgive?

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