Hermosillo functions in 2666 as a regional counterpart to Santa Teresa: a place from which television broadcasts, police personnel, workers, and commercial networks reach the border city, but also a destination through which the killings and their investigations are filtered. The connection is material and institutional, not merely geographic. Santa Teresa’s factories and roads extend across a region whose economic activity crosses the border, while the officials and media based in Hermosillo repeatedly enter the story without bringing its unresolved violence to a close.

Regional Connections

The contrast between the cities emerges in the account of Santa Teresa’s expanding urban landscape. Its industrial horizon is marked by maquiladoras, and the city’s population includes workers arriving from elsewhere and immigrants from Central America. Chucho Flores describes factories, low unemployment, a cocaine cartel, and an infrastructure unable to keep pace with demographic growth. This portrait places Santa Teresa within a regional economy rather than apart from it: industry and transport connect the city to wider circuits of labor and commerce, even as rapid growth and inequality strain local life.

Hermosillo is part of those circuits. Kelly Rivera Parker’s travel records, as recounted in an investigation, show repeated trips from Mexico City to Hermosillo and onward to Santa Teresa between 1990 and 1994. She traveled onward on seven of at least ten visits to Hermosillo, sometimes with several models and later alone. Her meetings with Salazar Crespo were listed as party planning; she also worked on three occasions for Conrado Padilla, a Sonora businessman with interests in maquiladoras, transport companies, and the Santa Teresa slaughterhouse. The itinerary ties the regional capital to Santa Teresa’s business networks, while the investigator’s report leaves the precise character and purpose of the visits contested rather than settled.

Media and Public Attention

Hermosillo is also the source of a television signal that sometimes reaches Santa Teresa. Florita Almada appears on An Hour with Reinaldo, a popular Sonora program broadcast from studios in Hermosillo. During her first appearance, reception in Santa Teresa is poor, interrupted by ghostly images, fog, and background noise; almost no one in the city sees her. The imperfect transmission gives the regional medium a literal limit: a message may be made public and still fail to arrive where the violence is occurring.

Florita’s later appearances bring different kinds of speech into that broadcast space. At Reinaldo’s request, she discusses three books she has written and her wish that education could open children’s eyes to culture and life. In another appearance, she reports that her protectors say the crimes will continue and that people wish her ill; her attempt to address the spirit of a victim ends in a genuine blackout and hospitalization. The program makes her a public voice, but it cannot turn prediction into prevention. Hermosillo’s media reach Santa Teresa intermittently, carrying testimony and spectacle across the same distance that separates public attention from effective response.

Police and Investigative Networks

The connection between Hermosillo and Santa Teresa is also visible in the movement of police and investigative personnel. In October, five judicial police inspectors were sent from Hermosillo to reinforce the team already working in Santa Teresa. Their arrival followed a period in which no women’s bodies had been found in the city or desert, but the cases remained unresolved; the additional investigators were described as seeming capable of the task. Their presence adds state capacity to the narrative without supplying a resolution: investigations continue through visiting teams, files, and interviews, while the killings’ larger pattern remains uncertain.

A separate American inquiry also passed through the city’s institutions. When the Huntsville sheriff disappeared and reports placed his last known sighting in Santa Teresa, the American consul, Abraham Mitchell, asked the police chief whether the sheriff had been there officially or as a tourist. The chief disclaimed knowledge, noting that many tourists passed through. The consul nevertheless arranged access to photographs of unidentified bodies found in Santa Teresa from November 1994 onward, and Rory Campuzano, an assistant to the sheriff, traveled from Huntsville to review them. None matched the missing sheriff. The exchange shows how a missing person could draw cross-border attention, while the city’s unidentified dead offered only a limited and inconclusive means of investigation.

Later, a group of Tucson police officers came to Santa Teresa and met local officials, including Pedro Negrete, Inspector Ortiz Rebolledo, and Inspector Juan de Dios Martinez. They discussed drug trafficking, spoke with medical examiners, examined records of unidentified bodies found in the desert, and visited a brothel before leaving. Their tour connects Hermosillo’s wider regional setting to a network of local and American law enforcement, but the visit is presented as a brief passage through the city rather than a breakthrough in the murders. Across these episodes, institutions cross into Santa Teresa to gather information, yet the movement of personnel does not overcome the uncertainty surrounding the cases.

Regional Industry and Cross-Border Reach

Hermosillo’s connection to Santa Teresa is visible in the movement of people and commercial interests across the region. Kelly Rivera Parker’s travel records, as described in an investigative report, show at least ten trips from Mexico City to Hermosillo between 1990 and 1994; on seven occasions she continued to Santa Teresa. Her companions changed over time: at first she may have traveled with four or five models, later with two, and on her final trips alone. Meetings with Salazar Crespo were recorded as party planning, and she also worked three times for Conrado Padilla, a Sonora businessman whose interests included maquiladoras, transport companies, and Santa Teresa’s slaughterhouse. The itinerary links Hermosillo to the border city’s business networks, although the report’s suspicions about the nature of Parker’s work remain allegations, not established conclusions.

The region’s economy is likewise described through Santa Teresa’s industries and infrastructure. The city has factories, maquiladoras, a cocaine cartel, and a steady influx of workers from other cities and Central America, while its infrastructure cannot support the pace of demographic growth. Its industrial horizon and road connections place it within a wider system of labor and commerce that crosses the border. Hermosillo is one of the points through which those networks become visible, but their reach does not itself explain or resolve the violence in Santa Teresa.

Regional Industry and Cross-Border Reach

The regional economy is also visible in the movement of workers and goods across the border. Santa Teresa’s factories and maquiladoras draw workers from other cities and from Central America, while its infrastructure struggles to keep pace with rapid demographic growth. Commercial traffic links the city to a broader network: Pedro Uribe, identified in a press conference as the father of Antonio Uribe, owns more than a hundred cargo trucks carrying merchandise from maquiladoras in Hermosillo and Santa Teresa across the border every half hour or hour. These connections make Hermosillo part of the material circuits surrounding Santa Teresa, but they do not explain or resolve the violence there.