STORY OF MEXICAN KILLINGS IMPOSSIBLE TO IGNORE.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

THE UNSOLVED MURDERS of hundreds of women in the Mexican border city of Juarez remain a depressing, enraging puzzlement.

``Senorita Extraviada'' (``Missing Young Woman''), Lourdes Portillo's documentary on the subject, cannot come close to solving the mystery. But it does put the magnitude of the decade-long crime spree into perspective, illuminating how cultural, political and global financial forces contribute to the unchecked outrage. The film also proposes many possible culprits, though none definitively.

Perhaps the movie's most concrete accomplishment is as a celluloid memorial. Time after time, Portillo's cameras zero in on the pictures, families and stories of the uniformly poor girls, most all of them workers in the low-paying maquilador manufacturing plants that have sprouted along the border in the wake of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Too easily forgotten once their desecrated remains have been discovered in the desert and the tabloid media moves on to the next girl gone missing, these victims of God-knows-what are, at least here, remembered for as long as the film will be seen.

Portillo, whose best-known work was probably the Academy Award-nominated documentary about Argentina's disappeared, ``The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo,'' fails to really isolate a plausible explanation. It's a condition the movie shares with the Juarez police - some of whom are suspects themselves - and the government of Chihuahua state. Like local officials, Portillo digs up circumstantial evidence against the aforementioned cops, as well as gang members, an Egyptian chemist employed by one of the multinationals, narco traffickers, cult ritualists, gringo thrill-killers from across the border, even a conspiracy of bus drivers.

Some harrowing tales are told, but nothing really sticks. Meanwhile, the Chihuahua governor doesn't help matters any by declaring that if these young women - who generally fit within certain parameters of physical attractiveness, mostly come from poorer sections of the country and work long, laborious hours - didn't dress so provocatively and club-hop in their free time, this wouldn't be happening to them.

Which, along with doubling and maybe quadrupling standards, conveniently avoids a lot of facts, not the least of which is why the abduction murders are rampant in Juarez but not other border cities. It's a mystery the fundamental core of which is obvious - some local factor inspires some men to do this, and indigenous political considerations allow them to get away with it. But the specifics remain maddeningly elusive.

Portillo could conceivably have made a more compelling, harder-hitting and better-focused narrative out of ``Senorita Extraviada.'' But she did not need to. The tragedy, unfairness and sheer repulsive indignity of the situation speak, in ghastly sorrow, all for themselves.

SENORITA EXTRAVIADA - Three stars

(Not rated: violence, nudity, language)

Director: Lourdes Portillo.

Running time: 1 hr. 14 min.

Playing: Nuart, West L.A.

In a nutshell: Sad documentary about the unsolved murders of hundreds of young Mexican factory women could have been better focused, but is compelling enough to sustain interest.