In an interview with Revista Enfoques, director Craig Whitney discusses The Red Note, the bilingual investigative podcast that examines the femicides in Ciudad Juárez over the past quarter century.
Reported and produced by a cross-border team of journalists and filmmakers from Mexico and the United States, the podcast brings together interviews with families of victims, academics, and authorities to explore how corruption, impunity, machismo, organized crime, and broader social forces have allowed gender-based violence to proliferate far beyond the border city.
Narrated by journalist Lydia Cacho, the podcast synthesizes on-the-ground reporting conducted in January and February 2020, when the team traveled to Ciudad Juárez to meet directly with families affected by feminicide.
Whitney explains that although he had read extensively about the violence, the experience of sitting with parents who had lost daughters was profoundly different”. He credits Juárez-based journalist Alicia Fernández with making those conversations possible. “Even so, I am very happy to have the help of journalist Alicia Fernández to do the interviews,” he says, noting that her longstanding relationships in the community created the trust necessary for families to speak about “the most horrible day of their lives.”
Whitney emphasizes that the project was never intended to be another conventional true-crime series. Instead, the goal was to foreground the voices of victims and their families and to situate individual cases within a broader context of systemic violence. “It is not a story only of real crimes,” he explains. “It has connections to many other stories about the world in which we live. We want to communicate that it is a story about systemic violence, gender violence.” The podcast deliberately avoids sensationalism, seeking to foster empathy and understanding rather than replicate the tropes of fictional crime dramas.
The idea for The Red Note emerged from Whitney’s familiarity with the stories of Juárez from his home state of Texas and the project’s origin as a feature film, still in development. Whitney describes Ciudad Juárez as a place shaped by multiple overlapping forces, including organized crime, corruption, trafficking, weapons flows, and infrastructure challenges, and argues that these dynamics are not unique to one city but reflect global patterns.
He also recounts the warmth the team received in Juárez, despite initial anxieties about trust. “I’m a gringo, and I was nervous that the people on the border will not like the project or that they will not trust us,” he says, adding that community support strengthened the project.
The Red Note is available in English, with a Spanish-language counterpart titled La Nota Roja. Both versions can be found on major podcast platforms, including Spotify and Apple Podcasts.