Department of Sex Crimes

The Department of Sex Crimes is a government research agency in Santa Teresa, barely a year old when journalist Sergio Gonzalez speaks with its head, Yolanda Palacio. Her account gives the institution a stark significance: it can name the scale of violence against women, but its ability to investigate or secure an effective response is far smaller than the need it documents.

Mandate and staffing

Palacio, about thirty, studied law at the University of Santa Teresa and specialized in criminal law at the University of Hermosillo. Finding that she did not want to become a trial lawyer, she went into research. The department’s work concerns sex crimes and their prevalence; Palacio tells Gonzalez that more than two thousand women a year are victims of such crimes in the city, nearly half of them minors. She estimates that at least as many attacks go unreported, putting the total at roughly four thousand rapes annually—more than ten a day. Some, she adds, end in murder.

A stark measure of the crisis

Palacio compares the reported male-to-female ratio of killings in Mexico, ten to one, with Santa Teresa’s ten to four. The contrast marks the city as an extreme case rather than a routine local variation. Her figures also resist a narrow focus on the women whose deaths become visible: the estimated unreported assaults point to a much larger field of violence than official records alone capture.

That evidence does not translate into institutional capacity. Palacio tells Gonzalez that the department has no staff besides herself. A secretary had worked there, but left for Ensenada to be near family. The agency’s name suggests a specialized public response; its actual operation, as described by its chief, rests on a single researcher.

The wider institutional landscape

The novel places the department’s figures beside recurring failures in the handling of individual cases. Isabel Urrea’s killing is initially explained as a frustrated robbery, a lunatic’s or drug addict’s act, or possibly the work of a Central American veteran seeking money to reach the United States. There is no autopsy, at the family’s request, and the ballistic analysis is never made public before being lost between the courts of Santa Teresa and Hermosillo. The account does not establish that the department handled Urrea’s case; rather, the missing evidence illustrates the broader institutional conditions against which its statistics acquire force.

Other cases show how investigations can lose momentum or coherence. After the suspected killer of Emilia Mena Mena cannot be found in Ciudad Guzman, her case remains open and is soon forgotten. When the investigation into the Penitent stalls and he appears to have vanished, Juan de Dios Martinez is reassigned to armed robberies; officials say that limited staffing requires priority for cases considered more urgent, even while insisting the Penitent inquiry is not closed. These episodes show how administrative classification and scarce personnel shape what receives sustained attention.

Public record and narrative significance

The department’s work is framed not as a solution but as a way of making the crisis measurable. Palacio’s count encompasses reported victims, minors, probable underreporting, and assaults that end in murder. Read alongside cases in which evidence disappears, a suspect is not located, or investigators are diverted, the statistics expose the distance between knowing that violence is widespread and being able to act on that knowledge.

The agency thus stands at the intersection of research and institutional insufficiency. Its lone chief can articulate numbers that challenge the city’s normalized account of violence, yet the department’s minimal staffing offers no parallel promise of protection or resolution. The novel’s juxtaposition of those numbers with unresolved cases makes the institution’s importance inseparable from its limits.