General Sepulveda industrial park is a maquiladora zone on the outskirts of Santa Teresa, bound to the city’s expanding urban fringe and to the routes connecting factories, neighborhoods, and the United States border. The novel returns to it as both a place of employment and a geographic marker in the accounts of women who disappear or are found dead nearby: its significance lies in the contrast between the routine movement of workers and the weak public infrastructure and unresolved violence surrounding that movement.

Setting and Urban Context

The park belongs to a city whose edges are continually being remade. Santa Teresa’s industrial parks are ringed by settlements, and the city’s neighborhoods extend outward toward warehouses, vacant lots, and the horizon of maquiladoras. The landscape does not separate work from residence cleanly: industrial sites sit beside roads and communities where urban growth has outpaced infrastructure. As the city expands, the park is not a remote exception to Santa Teresa but part of the ordinary geography through which residents travel.

The novel’s citywide view places the industrial zone among contrasting districts: neglected central plazas, poor neighborhoods assembled from scrap, and more orderly middle- and upper-class areas. To the west, slums encircle industrial parks; farther east, middle-class neighborhoods eventually give way to slums across rough terrain. From the north, the United States border fence and the Arizona desert are visible. This shifting map makes the park part of a border city’s connected, uneven spaces rather than an isolated workplace.

Work, Commuting, and Infrastructure

The industrial park is associated with women’s factory employment and the daily journeys that employment requires. A particularly clear account concerns Margarita Lopez, who worked the third shift at K&T in El Progreso industrial park and left at about five-thirty in the morning. Her route home crossed the Nogales highway and continued through Colonia Guadalupe Victoria toward Colonia San Bartolome. The journey was estimated at roughly fifty minutes, but its ordinary sequence could not be reconstructed beyond the point at which she left work and began walking.

The surrounding conditions made that commute difficult to observe and support. The early morning was dark, public lighting was inadequate, and much of northern Colonia Guadalupe Victoria had no electricity. Roads leading out of the industrial park, apart from the route to the Nogales highway, lacked sufficient lighting, paving, and drainage. Waste from the park accumulated in Colonia Las Rositas as a broad muddy area that dried pale in the sun. These concrete failures are not incidental scenery: they define the practical environment in which workers moved between factory shifts and home, while leaving the precise circumstances of Margarita’s disappearance unknown.

The novel also connects the park’s production to commerce across the border. In a description of Santa Teresa’s economy, Chucho Flores lists factories and maquiladoras alongside low unemployment, poverty, drug trafficking, migrant arrivals, and an urban infrastructure unable to sustain the pace of demographic growth. Klaus Haas later tells reporters that Pedro Uribe owns more than a hundred cargo trucks transporting goods from maquiladoras in Hermosillo and Santa Teresa; the trucks cross the border every half hour or hour. The park thus belongs to a supply chain whose goods move routinely across national lines, even as the people and neighborhoods tied to that economy remain exposed to uneven services and insecurity.

The Industrial Park and the Murders

Several accounts place victims’ lives or the discovery of their bodies in relation to General Sepulveda industrial park. Rosa Lopez Larios lived with two friends who, like her, had worked at maquiladoras in the park. She was found in a grove near a Pemex tower, and police learned that her boyfriend, a Pepsi delivery worker, had stopped appearing at his job. Investigators pursued possible connections and questioned people associated with his household, but the inquiries produced no resolution. The case was abandoned by one inspector, while another continued to wonder whom Rosa might have gone to meet. The narrative preserves that uncertainty rather than converting proximity to the park into an explanation of her death.

At the end of March, Beverly Beltran Hoyos, a sixteen-year-old maquiladora worker at General Sepulveda, was found on open ground west of the industrial park after having been missing for three days. Her mother had waited five hours at a police station before her missing-person report was taken forward. The investigation focused on questioning coworkers and looking for a boyfriend who did not exist; no one systematically examined the crime scene or documented the many tracks there. The account sets the concrete proximity of her workplace and discovery site against an investigation that failed to make use of evidence at the scene.

The same geography recurs in the account of Angelica Nevares, known as Jessica, whose body was found near a sewage ditch west of General Sepulveda industrial park. She had worked as a dancer at local nightclubs and had lived in Santa Teresa for five years. Her case connects the industrial fringe with other precarious urban workplaces and nighttime spaces, without establishing that the park itself was involved in the crime.

Narrative Significance

General Sepulveda industrial park is significant not as a single crime scene but as a repeated point in the novel’s map of labor, circulation, and disappearance. Workers leave factories at hours when streets are dark; industrial waste and underdeveloped roads shape the neighborhoods around them; and bodies are found in open ground close enough to workplaces for the relationship to matter but not enough to solve the crimes. The narrative is careful about the limits of what can be known: a route can be reconstructed, an employment record established, or a body located, while the event that links these facts remains inaccessible.

The park also sits within a cross-border economy that moves merchandise efficiently while the city’s infrastructure strains under growth. That contrast gives the location a broader force. It is a place where industrial production and urban expansion are plainly visible, yet the women who sustain the city’s labor system can become difficult to trace when they disappear. The park’s recurring presence therefore links economic modernity to an unresolved crisis of public space and accountability, without implying that factory work itself explains or causes the violence.