1994

The year 1994 marks a stage in which the killings of women in Santa Teresa became inseparable from the city’s geography and rhythms of work. Industrial expansion, long commutes, inadequate public services, and episodic media attention shaped the circumstances in which victims disappeared and were found; a brief year-end pause did not establish that the danger had passed.

A city expanding around its workers

Santa Teresa is presented as a city growing faster than its infrastructure can support. Its industrial horizon is formed by maquiladoras, while rail lines, shantytowns, highways, vacant lots, and a garbage-filled gully mark the southern outskirts. Industrial parks sit amid surrounding settlements, and the city’s expansion seems to proceed continually, with black vultures appearing in barren fields at its far edge. This landscape is not incidental to the year’s cases: it places employment, housing, transport, and exposure to violence in close proximity, while leaving large spaces difficult to illuminate or supervise.

The city’s economy combines factories and maquiladoras, a low unemployment rate, substantial poverty and wealth, drug trafficking, and a steady flow of workers from other cities and from Central America. Chucho Flores describes this mixture as a place with both money and poverty, bureaucracy and imagination, violence and a desire for peace, but without time. His account gives the year a structural tension: the city’s growth and labor demands move faster than its capacity to provide secure infrastructure or sustained attention to the people living and working there.

Disappearances on the journey home

The case of Margarita Lopez Santos makes that tension concrete. Sixteen years old and employed at K&T in the El Progreso industrial park, she worked the night shift from nine in the evening until five in the morning. She was considered dependable and arrived for work on time. After leaving at about five-thirty, she would have crossed the Nogales highway and walked through Colonia Guadalupe Victoria toward her home in Colonia San Bartolome, a journey of roughly fifty minutes.

The route offered little protection. It was still dark at the shift change, public lighting was insufficient, and many homes in the northern part of Colonia Guadalupe Victoria had no electricity. Roads beyond the industrial park lacked adequate lighting, paving, and drainage; industrial waste collected as a muddy lake in Colonia Las Rositas. The narrative cannot establish precisely what happened to Margarita after she left work. More than forty days later, children found her body near a shack in Colonia Maytorena, and the state of the remains prevented the examiner from determining the cause of death. The uncertainty is part of the record, not an explanation of her disappearance.

Bodies, records, and limits of identification

In October, a young woman was found at the new city dump, a vast site in a gully south of El Ojito ravine, beside a highway used by more than one hundred trucks a day. The examiner estimated that she was between fifteen and seventeen; scavengers described her clothing, and investigators noted a gold ring bearing the name of an English academy in the city center. The ring prompted a visit to the school, while photographs appeared in local newspapers, but no one identified her. After two weeks, her body was sent to serve the needs of medical students at the University of Santa Teresa. The episode joins the city’s expanding waste landscape to the institutional handling of an unidentified victim: investigation produced details, but not a name.

In November, workers discovered another woman’s body on the second floor of a building under construction in Colonia Podesta. Investigators checked hotels and boardinghouses, published her photograph, and compared her description with missing-person reports from other states, without finding an identification. Epifanio Galindo focused on the circumstances of the body’s placement: the woman did not appear to come from the neighborhood, and leaving her in a building in an upper part of the city required a different choice from disposing of her in the desert or near a dump. He considered the question for two days but found no satisfactory answer. The investigation’s unease remains unresolved; the available clues do not reveal who placed her there or why.

That same month, Silvana Perez Arjona was found in a vacant lot by women from Colonia Las Flores, who called for medical help. Her identity was established the next day: she had worked at a maquiladora in the General Sepulveda industrial park and had left school for financial reasons before taking the job. The account traces her movement from work and family circumstances into a relationship with Carlos Llanos, but the rapid solving of her murder would soon become a separate public narrative, one that risked obscuring the earlier failures to protect or identify other victims.

Attention, interruption, and the year’s close

The killings did not receive steady public attention. Chucho Flores compares the periodic rise in coverage to a snowball: the figures increase, the story grows, and then attention melts away as people return to work. In his description, the murders are like a brutal strike, interrupting a city organized around labor even as daily routines resume. This cycle helps explain why visibility in the press does not equal sustained investigation or change.

By the time Silvana’s case was solved, its speed had displaced attention from prior police failures. Lalo Cura challenged young officers who joked about whether a man could rape a woman he had married, insisting that the issue was whether she had been forced to do something against her will. His intervention marks a conflict over how violence is understood even within the police environment. December 1994 then passed without further killings of women that anyone knew of, and the year ended peacefully. That ending records a lull in known cases, not a conclusion to the crisis: the city’s structural conditions and the unresolved identities and circumstances surrounding other victims remain in place.