Azucena Esquivel Plata

Azucena Esquivel Plata is a PRI congresswoman and former journalist whose efforts to find her missing friend Kelly Rivera Parker connect the Santa Teresa killings to political power, investigative reporting, and the limits of official accountability. She recruits Sergio Gonzalez to write about the city and its violence, making her both a source of information and a forceful advocate for turning what institutions leave unresolved into a public record.

Political Presence and Background

Azucena first enters Sergio’s story as a voice of authority. At four in the morning, she calls him, asks whether he is alone, and summons him downstairs; she arrives in a Mercedes with its lights off, wrapped in a plaid blanket and wearing oversized dark glasses. At her house, she asks for coffee and tequila, then turns quickly to the business that brought her there: whether he has heard of Kelly Rivera Parker. Her manner is imperious, but the encounter’s purpose is practical. She wants a reporter’s attention directed toward a missing woman whom, she fears, the country has already failed to notice.

Her account of her past reveals the class and political world from which she comes. She and Kelly met as girls and spent school recesses together. Azucena’s family disapproved of Kelly’s parents: her father was an architect whose work for wealthy clients made him seem, to the Esquivel Platas, a social climber, while her mother was American and regarded by the family with suspicion. Despite that prejudice, Kelly visited Azucena’s home frequently. Azucena remembers Kelly as stubborn and clear in her preferences, and recalls that she liked the Esquivel Plata house better than her own, even though Kelly’s was more comfortable and better appointed.

The friendship was interrupted when they were twelve. After Kelly’s father died unexpectedly and left her mother deeply in debt, Kelly’s family moved from Coyoacan to an apartment in Colonia Roma and eventually to New York. Azucena remembers crying for two days when Kelly left. They remained in touch by telephone and saw one another a few more times, but the move became a lasting separation. The memory gives her later response to Kelly’s disappearance a personal history: she is not merely responding to a case but to the return, after years, of a friend whose absence once seemed final.

Azucena describes her own education as a break with her family’s inherited outlook. She was the first woman in her family to attend college, studying law before journalism. At college she encountered political actors and ideas beyond the world of her family, and says that she changed her priorities decisively. She presents this change not as a rejection of her own ambition but as a means of continuing to live as herself. Her family’s old political loyalties and social exclusions remain part of her account, but they no longer dictate the life she chooses.

A Life Outside Family Convention

Azucena recounts her early relationships with a frankness that resists the legends surrounding her sex life. She says her first sexual experience came from curiosity, not love, admiration, or fear, and that she left the first man after two months. She describes later lovers as choices shaped by boredom, wit, or eccentricity, while dismissing the men who treated intimacy with her as a political conquest. Her account challenges the public mythology around her by insisting on her own motives and decisions rather than the stories men tell about possessing her.

For a time she was involved in the university Left and visited Cuba. She later married a man who was also on the Left and had a son; her husband subsequently joined the PRI. Azucena worked in journalism, but the marriage lasted less than two years. She recalls returning on Sundays to her family’s old house, walking through its corridors and garden, looking through photographs and the diaries of earlier generations, and sitting for hours by the stone well. The house preserved a lineage that she felt herself outgrowing, even as its memories continued to hold her attention.

Her family tried to dissuade her from divorce, invoking marriage as a sacred obligation and threatening to leave her without support. Azucena says she eventually asserted authority over them and refused their terms. The episode echoes her later dealings with political institutions: she recognizes the force of inherited custom, but does not accept it as the final authority over her choices. Her narration makes personal independence and political command part of the same self-understanding.

Kelly’s Disappearance and the Search

Kelly’s disappearance brings the old friendship into the present. Three months after their most recent contact, Kelly’s partner called Azucena because Kelly had not returned from Santa Teresa. Her phone rang without an answer. Kelly had previously disappeared for a few days, but Azucena could not believe that she would leave without contacting her partner, especially when their work required her to handle business. The person who had hired Kelly said she had left a ranch party for the airport, intending to travel first to Hermosillo and then to Mexico City. Her rental car was found in the airport parking lot, but she had not boarded her flight.

At first Azucena tried to believe Kelly would reappear. She imagined that she might have left with a man or gone to Los Angeles or San Francisco, and initially waited rather than assume the worst. When another week passed without news, the partner’s isolation and practical difficulties made the absence harder to dismiss. The uncertainty is not resolved by the available information: the airport car establishes that Kelly reached the airport, but does not explain what happened after that.

Azucena travels to Santa Teresa to press for action. She tells the mayor that Kelly Rivera Parker has disappeared and that she wants her found. The mayor’s secretary records the details, and the mayor orders the head of the state judicial police, Ortiz Rebolledo, to come to city hall. Azucena does not mention the Salazar Crespo family, who had hired Kelly. Her decision to withhold that information leaves her testing what the local authorities will do without being steered toward a particular lead.

The search also connects Kelly’s disappearance to a wider pattern of institutional neglect. In the novel, other women’s deaths are variously explained as robbery, drug use, an overdose, or isolated crimes; investigations stall, evidence is lost, and cases remain open before being forgotten. Against that backdrop, the absence of a clear account of Kelly’s last movements carries a particular weight. Azucena’s personal insistence refuses the easy conversion of a missing woman into an unverified rumor or an abandoned file.

Recruiting the Press

Azucena turns to Sergio because she believes the press can reach places that official investigations will not. She tells him to keep writing about Santa Teresa, praises his articles while criticizing him for holding back, and urges him to investigate the city directly. By her fourth visit, she says, she had begun to understand Santa Teresa and the desert; she now knows many of the people and has learned of illicit activities. Yet she says she cannot simply pass what she knows to the Mexican police, whose officials might dismiss her as crazy, or to the American police, because she is Mexican and a Mexican congresswoman. Her formulation makes national identity both a commitment and a limit on which authorities she is willing to involve.

For Azucena, journalism is the remaining channel through which she can act. She says the political system is full of flaws, but maintains that freedom of expression has generally been respected. She distinguishes the relative lack of censorship surrounding books from the greater reach and consequence of newspapers, which people read at least for their headlines. The distinction clarifies why she chooses Sergio and the press: a published investigation can make the cases visible to a public that may never encounter their files.

Her appeal is not detached from political risk. Azucena acknowledges that pursuing the matter may hurt people she does not want to hurt, but says she accepts that possibility because times are changing and the PRI must change as well. She frames the conflict as one that political insiders will either fight among themselves or lose together. Her language places her neither wholly outside the system nor comfortably above it: she is a congresswoman who criticizes the party she belongs to, and uses her access to ask a reporter to confront what she says the state cannot or will not handle openly.

Narrative Role and Significance

Azucena’s account gives the search for Kelly a personal center without reducing the Santa Teresa crisis to a single disappearance. Her childhood memories establish the intimacy of the friendship; the missing car and unboarded flight set out the unanswered circumstances; her trip to the mayor shows her using political access; and her appeal to Sergio converts that access into a demand for public reporting. These strands make her a hinge between private loss, local investigation, and national politics.

Her self-presentation is deliberately complicated. She speaks with the confidence of someone accustomed to issuing instructions, yet recounts how she had to break from a rigid family world to become the person she is. She carries the privileges and contacts of an elite political family while condemning the social assumptions that shaped it, and she belongs to the PRI while demanding that it change. The unresolved search for Kelly gives those tensions their stakes: power may open doors and command attention, but it does not by itself explain a disappearance or guarantee justice. Azucena’s most decisive action is therefore to insist that the story be written and that Santa Teresa’s violence be addressed as more than a collection of forgotten cases.