El Obelisco is a poor settlement on the outskirts of Santa Teresa, described as neither quite a village nor a suburb and also known as El Moridero. Its shifting boundary, makeshift housing, and association with the discovery of two unidentified girls reveal how the city’s expansion folds marginal places into its geography without making their residents or victims more visible to institutions.

Setting and Boundaries

El Obelisco is a way station for people arriving from the south in search of a different life. The poorest residents sleep there, and some die in temporary dwellings they do not regard as homes but as one more stop along the road. The name El Moridero, which some people use instead, reflects the settlement’s association with unusually frequent death.

The place’s boundaries are unstable. It once lay beyond Santa Teresa’s city limits, when the area around Casas Negras was considered an independent town. A former stone monument consisted of three stones stacked unevenly; only imagination could make the pile resemble an obelisk, or a child’s crude drawing of one. The account turns this remnant into a measure of urban change: the settlement has been absorbed into the expanding city, while its name preserves a history that the new boundaries have overwritten.

A City Growing Around Its Margins

El Obelisco belongs to a city whose built environment is described as growing by the second. Santa Teresa’s edges include poor neighborhoods, vacant lots, industrial parks, sheds, and the horizon of the maquiladoras. The eastern transition from middle-class neighborhoods to slums is repeated in a rougher landscape of hills, valleys, dry riverbeds, and the remains of ranches. To the west, industrial parks are themselves being surrounded by slums.

This expansion does not produce a single, orderly urban map. El Obelisco’s description as neither village nor suburb places it between settled categories, while the history of its former obelisk records how the city’s limits have shifted. Its residents’ movement through the settlement is part of a larger passage toward uncertain destinations, rather than a stable arrival into the city.

The Valley and the Unidentified Girls

The area around El Obelisco becomes part of the investigation into two girls found dead in a valley near the Casas Negras highway in March 1996. One, about ten years old, was found on one side of the highway; the other, approximately thirteen, was found a few days later on the opposite side. Neither carried anything that could establish her identity. The official account said the younger girl had not lived in Santa Teresa, but did not explain what she was doing there or how she had arrived.

The locations prompted police investigator Juan de Dios Martinez to consider how the bodies might have been brought there and whether the disposal sites were meant to redirect suspicion toward people living in El Obelisco. He also questioned why the bodies had been left apart and why the first had been carried down into the valley rather than abandoned closer to the road. These possibilities remain questions, not answers; the investigation does not establish who killed the girls or why their bodies were left in separate places.

Raids and Narrative Significance

Inspector Angel Fernandez handled the case and led a raid in El Obelisco, arresting twenty people. Four were convicted of theft and imprisoned; another died in the cells of Precinct #2, officially from tuberculosis. No one confessed to either girl’s murder, and the arrests did not resolve the deaths.

El Obelisco is therefore not merely a point on the outskirts of Santa Teresa. Its marginal position makes it a focus of police suspicion, while the girls’ unidentified status and the unresolved investigation expose the limits of the official response. The old three-stone monument and the valley near the highway frame a landscape in which both urban boundaries and the route to an explanation remain unsettled.