Guadalupe Roncal

Guadalupe Roncal is a reporter sent to investigate the killings of women in Santa Teresa, a dangerous assignment inherited after her predecessor is murdered. Her story joins two forms of vulnerability: the women whose deaths are repeatedly minimized or forgotten, and the journalist trying to make those deaths visible while fearing that the investigation itself may put her in danger.

Identity and Assignment

Fate first encounters Roncal at the Sonora Resort after she has overheard his phone conversation with his editor about the killings. In jeans and a leather jacket, with sunglasses, a camera, and a bag, she initially looks to him like a tourist. She introduces herself, offers her hand, and explains that she works for a major Mexico City newspaper. She is staying at the hotel because she is afraid, hoping that the presence of sports reporters will make her safer.

Roncal says the assignment landed on her desk only about a week earlier. Until then, the murders had not been her beat: she had not followed the case or written about it. She is therefore neither an established expert nor a veteran investigator, although she has inherited a substantial file and has begun to learn what it contains. The contrast between her limited experience and the scope of the story becomes central to her account of the work.

Taking Over the Investigation

The newspaper gives Roncal the case after her predecessor is killed. According to her, the paper’s senior editors summoned her to lunch, offered her a raise of roughly forty percent, and then handed her his files with instructions to work exclusively on the killings in Santa Teresa. She understood that refusing could mean losing the opportunity and the pay increase. One editor praised her intelligence; the other emphasized that she was unknown. The promotion thus provides resources and professional recognition while also placing a relatively obscure reporter in a role that has already proved perilous.

Roncal explains that her predecessor had spent seven years trying to develop a general understanding of what was happening. His death is officially treated as a robbery gone wrong: after getting into a taxi in Mexico City, he was joined by two strangers, driven among cash machines, and later stabbed. Roncal regards the circumstances as part of the danger surrounding the reporting, not as a reason to abandon it. His papers also refer to two other journalists investigating the Santa Teresa murders: a radio correspondent who was kidnapped in Mexico City and a Chicano reporter for an Arizona newspaper who disappeared. Roncal says the correspondent was someone she had encountered at journalism school, though they were not friends. The reports of violence against journalists make clear to her that the threat can extend beyond Santa Teresa.

Fear and the Cost of Reporting

Roncal describes herself as frightened by the possibility of being beaten, kidnapped, or tortured. She has no prior experience with the subject and says that fear lessens with experience, but she has not acquired that protection. She came to Santa Teresa terrified; during the flight from Hermosillo, she says, she would not have minded if the plane had crashed, because she imagined that as a quicker death. A Mexico City colleague directed her to the Sonora Resort while Fate was there covering a boxing match, believing the hotel’s concentration of sportswriters would offer her some security.

The assignment also changes her habits. After reading her predecessor’s files, she begins drinking much more whiskey and also turns to vodka, tequila, and bacanom, a Sonoran drink. She describes herself as increasingly afraid and sometimes unable to keep her nerves under control. Her nervousness does not make her account unreliable within the scene; rather, it makes the danger of the work legible as an everyday pressure that follows her into the hotel and shapes the way she approaches other people.

Roncal also frames her appointment in gendered terms. She tells Fate that women cannot turn down assignments, presenting the editors’ offer as a choice constrained by the prospect of losing both the position and the raise. She reflects that Mexican men find feminism charming only in young women, and that sustaining a feminist position becomes harder with age. Her later request for a man to accompany her to the prison is not presented as a simple abandonment of those beliefs: she openly acknowledges the contradiction and explains that she would feel safer with company.

Working with Oscar Fate

Fate’s rejected proposal to his editor gives Roncal a potential ally. He has tried to redirect his assignment from the boxing match to the killings, arguing that the story involves the possibility of one or two serial killers, drug trafficking, the border, police corruption, and Santa Teresa’s rapid growth. His editor refuses and tells him to finish the sports assignment and return to New York. After overhearing the call, Roncal approaches him directly and asks whether he is interested in the killings.

She invites Fate to share a drink and explains both her assignment and her fear. At first, he wonders whether she might be mentally unstable or trying to seduce him, but her explanation gives him a clearer understanding of why she sought him out. She asks him to accompany her to interview the chief suspect, an American who has been imprisoned for years. Fate questions how a man can remain the chief suspect if killings continue, and Roncal answers with the phrase “Mysteries of Mexico.” She says she wants a man with her despite her feminist convictions, then invites him to join her. Fate agrees and they arrange to meet at the hotel entrance two days later.

Roncal describes the suspect through three photographs in her predecessor’s papers, all taken in prison. Two show him seated and facing the camera; in the third he stands, looking to the side. She remembers his very blond hair and blue eyes, his exceptional height and thinness, and an expression she reads as a dreamer’s. What unsettles her is not a claim that he appears calm, angry, or uncomfortable—she says he seems to be none of these—but her impression that his dreams are far ahead of other people’s. This portrait conveys her apprehension while preserving the limits of what she knows: she has seen photographs, not yet interviewed him.

Narrative Role and Significance

Roncal brings the machinery of reporting into the novel’s account of Santa Teresa: files passed from one journalist to another, editors weighing assignments, and a story whose urgency competes with budgets and the routine demands of a sports desk. Fate’s editor rejects the proposed investigation, while Roncal’s newspaper assigns it to her after the previous reporter’s death. The contrast shows that the murders’ public visibility is neither steady nor guaranteed; it depends on people choosing to pursue the story despite institutional constraints and personal risk.

The novel places Roncal’s account alongside descriptions of the killings and their aftermath, where bodies are found in vacant lots, fields, and other marginal spaces, while investigations meet delays, missing information, or explanations that close cases prematurely. The number of victims is itself unstable: people speak of more than two hundred deaths, perhaps many more, while the precise total remains unknown. Roncal’s inherited file and her intention to interview the imprisoned suspect represent an effort to connect cases that official accounts and periodic news attention may leave fragmented. Her role is not to resolve the mystery in the scenes provided, but to make visible the perilous work of asking questions—and the personal and institutional forces that can silence those questions.