1997

The year 1997 marks a point at which the violence against women in Santa Teresa becomes more publicly legible, but not more securely understood or controlled. A mass march protests the killings and impunity; Klaus Haas publicly names Antonio Uribe as a killer and describes the powerful family and criminal network around him; and women continue to be found dead. The year’s narrative places these disclosures beside incomplete investigations, shifting official accounts, and the ordinary rhythms of a city that keeps working and celebrating.

Public Attention and the Accusation Against the Uribes

At a press conference, Klaus Haas names Antonio Uribe as the killer of women in Santa Teresa and the surrounding area, including women whose bodies have been found beyond the city. He says he has met Antonio once. The accusation redirects the reporters’ attention from an isolated suspect to a family with substantial economic reach and ties to organized crime.

Haas identifies Antonio’s father, Pedro Uribe, as the owner of more than a hundred cargo trucks carrying goods from maquiladoras in Hermosillo and Santa Teresa across the border every half hour or hour. Pedro also owns property in Phoenix and Tucson. Haas says Pedro’s brother, Joaquin Uribe, owns hotels in Sonora and Sinaloa and a chain of coffee shops in Santa Teresa. Antonio and Daniel, Joaquin’s son, are described as protégés of Fabio Izquierdo, a narco who works for Estanislao Campuzano, and as socializing with the children of wealthy families, police officers, and narcos. The account makes the accusation consequential not only because it names two suspects, but because it connects them to wealth, transport, cross-border business, and local power.

The March and Maria Elena Torres

On November 23, the WSDP, NGOs, the PRD, and student groups organize a march from the university to city hall to protest the killings and the climate of impunity. The size of the demonstration is itself disputed: authorities estimate no more than five thousand participants, while organizers claim more than sixty thousand. Maria Elena Torres takes part. Two days later, she is found murdered in her home.

Torres, thirty-two, lived alone after separating from her husband. Police initially look for him, but Inspector Luis Villasenor concludes after a week of questioning that the likely suspect is her boyfriend, Augusto or Tito Escobar, whom she had been seeing for a month. Escobar is gone when police seek him. Three men who say they saw him return one night with blood on his shirt are questioned; the investigation produces a sketch and alerts police stations around the country, but the case goes nowhere. Torres’s murder follows the public demonstration without turning protest into protection or yielding a resolution.

Bodies, Reports, and Uncertainty

The year’s other cases show how uncertain identification and official explanation remain. On October 7, teenage baseball players find a girl’s body near railroad tracks and baseball fields. She has no identification, and none of the women reported missing matches her description. At the scene, Lalo Cura tells Epifanio that there is no crime scene: it has been wiped clean. His observation captures a recurring problem in the investigations, where the evidence itself appears compromised or insufficient to establish a coherent account.

On October 10, Lucia Dominguez Roa is found dead in Colonia Hidalgo. The first police report describes her as a prostitute and drug addict and suggests an overdose; the next day’s statement instead says she worked as a waitress and died from a gunshot wound. The changing account exposes how a victim’s social identity and the presumed cause of death can be recast even before an investigation has established what happened.

Kessler and the Year’s Uneasy End

For Albert Kessler, 1997 is a successful year of lectures and travel. He speaks at universities across the United States and travels to Paris, London, Rome, Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Warsaw. His international reputation, and the routine of signing translated books for readers, contrasts with the unresolved violence in Santa Teresa. The contrast does not supply an answer to the killings; it places the investigator’s public distinction alongside a crisis that continues without a settled explanation.

At the year’s end, two cases are closed after investigations described as halfhearted. One body is found in a bag near the eastern edge of the city, by a dirt road running along the border toward the mountains. The victim’s identity remains unstated in the account, and the medical examiners say she had been dead for a long time. Meanwhile, Christmas brings posadas, piñatas, and drinking; even in the poorest, unlit streets, people laugh. That ordinary celebration is not a resolution. It is the setting in which the city continues to live while its dead remain unaccounted for.

The City That Keeps Expanding

Santa Teresa’s physical growth supplies a broader setting for the violence. The city stretches outward through poor settlements, neglected central plazas, middle-class neighborhoods, abandoned factories, and industrial parks ringed by slums. At its northern edge, a fence divides Mexico from the United States; to the south, rail lines and improvised soccer fields sit among shacks, while a garbage-filled gully and the distant warehouses of the maquiladoras mark other parts of the urban landscape. The observers are convinced that the city is growing by the second. Its expanding geography makes the boundary between city and desert, and between inhabited space and places where people can disappear, increasingly difficult to locate.

The City That Keeps Expanding

Santa Teresa’s growth provides a broader setting for the violence. The city stretches through poor settlements, neglected central plazas, middle-class neighborhoods, abandoned factories, and industrial parks encircled by slums. At its northern edge, a fence divides Mexico from the United States; to the south, rail lines and makeshift soccer fields lie among shacks, while a garbage-filled gully and the distant warehouses of the maquiladoras mark other parts of the urban landscape. The observers are convinced the city is growing by the second. Its expanding geography makes the boundary between inhabited space and places where people can disappear increasingly difficult to locate.

The City That Keeps Expanding

Santa Teresa’s growth provides a broader setting for the violence. The city stretches through poor settlements, neglected central plazas, middle-class neighborhoods, abandoned factories, and industrial parks encircled by slums. At its northern edge, a fence divides Mexico from the United States; to the south, rail lines and makeshift soccer fields lie among shacks, while a garbage-filled gully and the distant warehouses of the maquiladoras mark other parts of the urban landscape. The observers are convinced the city is growing by the second. Its expanding geography makes the boundary between inhabited space and places where people can disappear increasingly difficult to locate.