Alleged snuff film industry in Santa Teresa

The alleged snuff film industry in Santa Teresa is a rumor that turns the city’s killings of women into a question about what can be seen, proved, and sold. By the end of 1996, Mexican media were reporting or hinting that films recording real murders were being made in northern Mexico and that Santa Teresa was their capital. The novel does not settle the allegation. Instead, it sets competing testimony beside a history of fabricated claims, a city shaped by border traffic and industrial expansion, and a pattern in which the killings repeatedly return to public attention only to recede again.

The Rumor and Its Setting

The allegation takes hold in a city whose growth is described as almost instantaneous and uneven. Santa Teresa’s outskirts combine industrial parks, slums, abandoned factories, highways, and the horizon of the maquiladoras; at its northern edge, a fence separates Mexico from the Arizona desert. The landscape links formal manufacturing and cross-border movement to poverty and exposed, unsettled spaces, without establishing that any of these conditions produced a film industry.

Chucho Flores gives the city’s pressures a compact inventory: factories and maquiladoras, low unemployment, a cocaine cartel, workers arriving from other cities, Central American immigrants, and infrastructure unable to keep pace with demographic growth. He says the city lacks time. In the same conversation he compares the killings to a strike that periodically becomes news, gathers attention, and then melts away as people return to work. The snuff-film rumor enters an environment where industrial labor, organized crime, rapid expansion, and public forgetting coexist, but the novel preserves the difference between that context and proof of a specific criminal enterprise.

Competing Accounts of the Films

In a late-1996 dinner conversation, veteran crime reporter Macario Lopez Santos asks former Mexico City police chief General Humberto Paredes what he thinks of the alleged industry. Paredes says he has witnessed many terrible things but has never seen such a film and is unsure they exist. Macario insists that they do. The general’s response leaves the central claim unsettled: his lack of firsthand knowledge is not a disproof, but his long career makes the absence conspicuous to the reporters.

Macario interprets the rumor as a symptom of a broader change in Mexico: corruption, the drug trade, and the money circulating around it. Paredes disputes the scale of that diagnosis. He argues that corruption was worse under earlier administrations, treats the social burden of drug trafficking as overstated, and says money alone would be enough to make such a film. Their disagreement is about more than whether the films exist. It concerns whether new forms of violence mark a new order or repeat older patterns, and whether the drug economy explains the alleged phenomenon. Neither man supplies conclusive evidence.

A Journalist’s Visit and an Unverified Screening

A correspondent for a Buenos Aires newspaper spends three days in Santa Teresa while traveling to Los Angeles. He cannot obtain permission to visit Klaus Haas in prison, but consults a local newspaper’s files on disappeared, kidnapped, and murdered women. Through a chain of introductions, he meets a man who claims to have seen a snuff film. The correspondent says he wants to view it out of professional interest and curiosity; the intermediary arranges a screening at a house in the north of the city.

The account offers no independent verification of what the correspondent sees. He asks for a copy afterward, but the man refuses. The following evening, while drinking at El Rey del Taco, the correspondent becomes uneasy and returns to his hotel by taxi. In Los Angeles, he writes a long article about the killings, centering it on the pornography business and the alleged underground market in films of real murders. His experience is presented as a reporter’s account, not as proof that the film was authentic or that a Santa Teresa industry existed.

The Precedent of the Film Called Snuff

The correspondent’s article supplies a history that complicates the local allegation. It traces the term “snuff film” to a 1972 production in Argentina, made by American couple Mike and Clarissa Epstein with Argentine performers and crew and an American cameraman, JT Hardy. During filming, Hardy becomes infatuated with their hostess, Estela, while maintaining a courteous distance from her. After the production, rumors spread that a young actress had died during filming and that the crew had killed her to record a real murder.

The rumors were not borne out by the film itself. When it opened in Los Angeles and New York the next year, it was a commercial failure. Epstein tried to exploit its gruesome reputation, but a television commentator examined it frame by frame and demonstrated that the purported murder had been faked. The film’s notoriety thus rests on a distinction the Santa Teresa rumor threatens to blur: a production can be promoted as real violence even when the apparent crime is staged. The novel’s embedded account gives readers a concrete reason to distrust sensational claims without using the fabrication of one film to disprove every later allegation.

The production’s surrounding history also shows how rumor can outlive a film and become entangled with real violence. Clarissa remained in Argentina and later returned to the United States during the military dictatorship; her new companion became active in a death squad. Epstein was later killed in a fall down an elevator shaft while making his final film. These events do not authenticate the alleged Santa Teresa films. Rather, they place the fictional history of the film called Snuff beside political violence and death, showing how an invented or faked spectacle can circulate in a world where other forms of violence are not invented.

Media Attention, Proof, and the Killings

The novel repeatedly shows that attention to the killings is episodic. A young visitor tells two European critics that more than two hundred women have died since 1993 or 1994, perhaps many more, and that no one will ever know the true number. Later, Chucho describes the cycle by which rising numbers make the story news again before attention fades. The snuff-film allegation enters this same cycle as a sensational possible explanation, one that promises an image of the violence while leaving the crimes themselves unresolved.

News organizations and officials provide no stable confirmation. When Oscar Fate asks his editor for time to report on the killings, the editor tells him to finish his boxing assignment and return; Fate argues that the murders, possible serial offenders, drug trafficking, border, police corruption, and the city’s growth deserve a story. In January 1996, Klaus Haas also challenges the assumption that the crimes have been solved, pointing out from prison that murders continued while he was held. These episodes do not establish a connection between Haas and any films, but they sharpen the article’s central problem: official and media narratives can claim certainty, lose interest, or redirect attention while the pattern of violence persists.

The alleged industry remains precisely that—alleged. The novel offers a reported claim, a disputed conversation, a journalist’s unverified account of a screening, and a precedent in which a supposed real murder was shown to be fake. Their arrangement makes uncertainty part of the subject rather than a gap to be filled: the rumor reveals the appetite for a single spectacular explanation, while the continuing killings, incomplete records, and fluctuating coverage resist that simplification.