1993

The year 1993 marks the beginning of the count of women killed in Sonora, not necessarily the beginning of the violence itself. The novel anchors the chronology in a thirteen-year-old girl, Esperanza Gomez Saldana, whose death was recorded in January, while insisting that other girls and women may have died earlier without being found, identified, or entered on any list. The distinction between a first counted victim and the first victim is central: the year provides a date for the record, but not a secure boundary around the violence.

A Beginning That Cannot Be Fixed

In January, children playing in a vacant lot in Colonia Las Flores found Esperanza’s body and alerted their parents. Two women were praying nearby; they said they did not know her and believed she was not from the neighborhood. The police eventually identified the girl, but the circumstances of her discovery already suggest how easily a victim could remain unknown. The narrative names her as the first woman counted in 1993, while leaving open the possibility that earlier deaths had gone unrecorded and that other victims had been buried in the desert or otherwise disappeared without trace.

The account moves between the certainty of a calendar and the uncertainty of evidence. An examination established that Esperanza had been strangled and had suffered assault, but identification came only after the body passed through several layers of official handling: a police station, a judge and police examination, photographs, a further examination by the police chief, and an autopsy at the city hospital. The medical examiner completed the procedure in the early hours of the morning, after which an orderly placed the body in a freezer. These details make the death legible as a case, but they do not resolve the larger question of how many women had already been lost beyond the reach of the record.

The Count and Its Limits

Five days after Esperanza’s death, Luisa Celina Vazquez, sixteen and five months pregnant, was found strangled in her home. The police arrested her partner, Marcos Sepulveda, and his associate Ezequiel Romero. Romero confessed to killing her after she ended their relationship and he believed himself to be the father of her unborn child. Sepulveda was released two days later. The investigation then turned toward trying to connect Romero to Esperanza’s murder, but the available account does not establish that he committed it. The close sequence of deaths thus creates an apparent pattern without proving that the cases share a perpetrator.

That distinction remains important throughout the novel’s treatment of 1993. At the year’s end, the narrative calls another death the last of 1993 while noting that the relationship among the killings had not been proved. In 1995, Santa Teresa’s public statement about a woman’s remains found in a field would likewise propose a possible killer and an imagined route across the country without establishing either. The recurring gap between a body, a forensic conclusion, and a defensible account of responsibility makes the chronology less a solved sequence than a record continually strained by missing identities and uncertain connections.

City, Work, and Public Attention

Santa Teresa is presented as a city expanding faster than its infrastructure can support. It contains maquiladoras, a cocaine cartel, a constant inflow of workers from other cities and Central America, and sharply coexisting wealth and poverty. Its outskirts include industrial parks surrounded by poor neighborhoods, dark roads, and settlements with inadequate services. The city’s growth is not offered as a simple cause of the murders, but it forms the material setting in which workers travel, disappear, and may fail to be noticed.

Years later, when the killings are discussed again, Chucho Flores describes their public visibility as cyclical: the numbers rise, the news returns, people talk, and then attention fades as daily work resumes. His comparison of the killings to a brutal strike gives the violence an unsettling relation to labor and interruption, while his description of the city underscores the pressure of factories, migration, poverty, and inadequate urban infrastructure. The novel therefore frames 1993 both as a date when the deaths began to be counted and as the opening of a crisis whose scale, origins, and public meaning remain unsettled.

A City Without a Stable Edge

The geography around Santa Teresa mirrors the instability of its chronology. A drive through the city passes from western streets of unpaved roads and improvised housing to a neglected center, then to more affluent eastern neighborhoods and the university. To the north, abandoned factories, bars, souvenir shops, and small hotels give way to poorer outskirts; to the south lie rail lines, shantytown soccer fields, highways, and a garbage-filled gully. Beyond them, industrial warehouses mark the horizon of the maquiladoras. The city seems to be growing by the second, with industrial parks themselves encircled by poor neighborhoods.

At the northern edge, the visitors look across a fence separating Mexico from the United States toward the Arizona desert. That boundary does not contain the novel’s account of violence: later, Antonio Uribe is named as a suspect in killings in Santa Teresa and the surrounding area, while his family’s trucking and property interests extend across the border. Yet the evidence does not make the border or the city’s growth a sufficient explanation for the murders. Instead, both expose the scale and complexity of the setting in which responsibility is difficult to locate and victims may disappear from public view.

The Border and Its Uneven Movements

The boundary with the United States is both visible and porous in the novel’s geography. On the American side, the small town of Adobe stretches along a main street toward a brightly lit vacant lot and a border post. Oscar Fate crosses there with his passport and press identification; when an officer asks whether he has come to write about the killings, he says he is traveling to cover a boxing match. Three hundred feet farther on, Mexican officials make him leave the car, open his suitcase, and present his documents and forms. From the customs house he sees the long fence between the countries, with four birds perched on its farthest stretch. The scene sets ordinary reporting and regulated passage beside the violence Fate is trying not to cover, while the exhausted officials and the repeated checks make the border a place of procedure rather than a clear dividing line.

That line also fails to contain the city’s economic and criminal networks. Antonio Uribe and Daniel Uribe are described as Mexican and American citizens who live in Santa Teresa and have another house in Phoenix. Their fathers’ businesses reach across the region: Pedro Uribe owns more than a hundred cargo trucks carrying goods from maquiladoras in Hermosillo and Santa Teresa across the border every half hour or hour, as well as property in Phoenix and Tucson; his brother Joaquin owns hotels in Sonora and Sinaloa and coffee shops in Santa Teresa. The brothers are identified as protégés of a drug trafficker and, by Haas, as the serial killers of Santa Teresa. The account places manufacturing, transport, property, and criminal influence in the same cross-border landscape, without presenting that network as proof of how any particular murder was committed.

A Record That Does Not Close

The novel’s later scenes keep 1993’s significance unsettled rather than converting the year into a clean origin story. In 1995, a skeleton found shallowly buried on a farm was identified as a woman’s, but neither her name nor a reliable date or cause of death could be established. Santa Teresa police issued a statement that shifted responsibility toward a hypothetical driver and an imagined journey from elsewhere, an explanation that evaded the question of what had happened locally. The episode recalls the earlier uncertainty surrounding deaths that might never enter the count: forensic classification can identify a victim’s sex, yet still leave identity, chronology, and responsibility beyond reach.

The same limits surface in the novel’s account of a girl found in October near railroad tracks and baseball fields. Her injuries were documented, but she carried no identification, and the feature that initially seemed likely to help identify her did not do so. At the scene, Lalo Cura tells his partner that there is no crime scene because it has been wiped clean; the physical evidence and the officers’ interpretations do not yield a stable account. Set beside Esperanza’s identification and the uncertain earlier deaths, this later case shows how the calendar’s first entry cannot guarantee that the violence can be bounded, linked, or solved.

The year’s place in the larger narrative is therefore both precise and provisional. The count begins in January 1993, and the book later calls a death at the end of that year its last, while explicitly withholding proof that the killings were related. The figure of a first victim gives the violence a documentary starting point, but the narrative repeatedly places that point against unnamed bodies, missing persons, changing reports, and speculation. 1993 is the beginning of an official chronology, not a demonstrated beginning of the killings themselves.