Impunity

Impunity in 2666 is more than the failure to punish an individual perpetrator: it is a pattern of institutional neglect, lost or inaccessible evidence, narrowed investigations, and public attention that repeatedly recedes. Across Santa Teresa, women disappear or are found dead while cases remain open, suspects vanish, and officials offer explanations that cannot be tested. The result is a city in which violence becomes both persistent and difficult to make legible as a single, answerable crisis.

A crisis made hard to count

The scale of the killings first reaches Jean-Claude Pelletier and Manuel Espinoza through a boy’s account: more than two hundred women had died, perhaps as many as two hundred and fifty or three hundred, from 1993 or 1994 onward. The boy insists that many more may have been killed and that no one will ever know. The number is therefore not a stable official total but an estimate shadowed by missing knowledge. Espinoza reflects that disbelief can itself be a kind of exaggeration: the scale sounds incredible, yet the difficulty of accepting it does not make it less real. The uncertain count is part of the crisis, not a reason to dismiss it.

Chucho Flores describes how the killings enter public conversation in bursts. When the numbers rise, the story becomes news again; people talk, and it grows like a snowball, until the attention melts and everyone returns to work. His comparison of the killings to a brutal strike gives the violence a social scale, while the return to work marks the routine that absorbs it. The public cycle of alarm and forgetting parallels the institutional one: a case briefly becomes visible without becoming a sustained demand for answers.

Evidence lost, cases displaced

The handling of Isabel Urrea’s murder shows how an early explanation can close down inquiry without resolving the crime. For the first three days, her radio station and newspaper covered the killing; it was then explained as a botched robbery, possibly committed by a mentally ill person or drug user seeking her car. Another theory attributed it to a Central American veteran trying to reach the United States. No autopsy was performed, at the family’s request, and the ballistic analysis was never made public before it was lost in transit between the courts of Santa Teresa and Hermosillo. These details do not establish who killed Urrea. They show how competing conjectures and missing forensic material leave the case without a dependable route to resolution.

The investigation of Emilia Mena Mena’s death likewise narrows around a suspect who cannot be found. Her boyfriend was the main suspect, but he had left before police arrived. His family said he had taken a bus; officers detained his father and two brothers, obtained an address in Ciudad Guzman, and found no trace of him there. The case remained open and was soon forgotten. Five days after Mena Mena’s body was discovered, another woman was found dead on school grounds, yet the earlier investigation had already begun to disappear from view. The formal status of an open case, in this account, does not guarantee active pursuit or public memory.

The same institutional triage appears when Juan de Dios Martinez is ordered away from the Penitent investigation and assigned to armed robberies. He is told the earlier inquiry is not closed, but the suspect has vanished, progress has stalled, and the city has too few investigators. Officers who had been watching churches around the clock are redirected to matters judged more beneficial to public security. Martinez accepts the change without protest. The decision is presented as resource allocation rather than an explicit abandonment, but its effect is to reduce the attention available to a stalled investigation.

Official explanations and unanswered demands

In May, the United States consul and the mayor arrange access to photographs of unidentified bodies found in Santa Teresa from November 1994 onward, so a visitor from Huntsville can look for the missing sheriff. None of the bodies is identified as him. The police chief’s response to the consul’s question—tourists pass through the city every day—rests on the sheer volume of visitors rather than information about this particular disappearance. The search produces no answer, and the consul concludes that it is better not to stir things up. The episode places the unresolved fate of one missing man beside the larger machinery of unidentified bodies and limited official knowledge.

When a girl’s body is found near railroad tracks in October, police and investigators crowd the area, but Juan de Dios Martinez and Lalo Cura conclude that there is no usable crime scene: it has been wiped clean. Their difference over whether this was deliberate does not restore what is missing. The scene is described as compromised, while the victim remains unidentified. The episode condenses the problem of accountability into an absence: institutional presence is visible, but the material basis for establishing what happened is not.

Kessler’s account of Santa Teresa’s neighborhoods broadens the problem beyond individual investigations. He tells reporters that walking in some districts in daylight is frightening for a man like him, and that for a woman it is dangerous to be out at night. Many streets, outside the main routes served by buses, are poorly lit or entirely unlit; he also says the police keep out of some neighborhoods. Local officers smile at what they consider his naivety, while state officials suggest that the difficulty may belong to the city police under Pedro Negrete. The exchange reveals both a concrete gap in safety and a dispersal of responsibility among institutions. Kessler’s observations identify conditions associated with danger, but do not turn those conditions into an explanation that can account for every killing.

Protest, reporting, and the limits of visibility

On November 23, the Women of Sonora for Democracy and Peace, alongside nongovernmental organizations, the PRD, and student groups, organize a march from the University of Santa Teresa to city hall against the killings and the climate of impunity. The discrepancy between the authorities’ estimate of no more than five thousand participants and the organizers’ claim of more than sixty thousand makes the scale of protest itself contested. Maria Elena Torres is among the marchers. Two days later she is found dead in her home. The juxtaposition makes the protest’s demand for protection and accountability painfully immediate, without establishing a connection between the march and her murder.

The response to the march’s organizers remains limited. In January, the Santa Teresa branch of WSDP holds a press conference with only two local reporters present. Its members describe the degrading treatment of relatives of the dead and display letters they intend to send to the state governor and the attorney general of the republic. The letters receive no answer. Although the branch grows from three members to twenty activists and supporters, its institutional appeal meets silence. The growth registers persistence and organizing; the unanswered correspondence shows how little that effort changes the official response in the evidence presented.

Oscar Fate encounters a parallel limit in journalism. He pitches a story about the women killed in Santa Teresa, possible serial perpetrators, drug trafficking, the border, police corruption, and the city’s expansion. His editor rejects the proposal for lack of interest or budget and tells him to finish his boxing assignment and return to New York. Fate argues that the killings matter more than the fight, but his editor holds to the assignment. The refusal does not disprove Fate’s account; it narrows what his magazine will support and publish. The novel thus links local failures of investigation to a wider economy of attention, in which a major story may be recognized by a reporter yet denied the time and resources needed to pursue it.

Repetition and the meaning of impunity

The novel’s cases repeatedly resist closure in distinct ways: Urrea’s ballistic analysis disappears; Mena Mena’s suspected boyfriend is gone and her case is forgotten; a later victim remains unidentified; the Penitent investigation yields to other priorities; and a search through photographs of unidentified bodies fails to answer the question that prompted it. These episodes should not be collapsed into a single explanation or treated as proof of one perpetrator. Their force lies in the recurrence of uncompleted procedures and vanishing information, which make reliable accountability harder even as the killings continue.

That pattern also clarifies the meaning of impunity in the novel. It is not simply a final verdict declaring someone innocent or guilty. It takes shape before any such verdict: in estimates that cannot be confirmed, investigations diverted or abandoned in practice, evidence that is never recovered, official explanations that remain unverified, and appeals that go unanswered. Against this, the march, WSDP’s press conference, the boy’s report, and Fate’s proposed investigation are attempts to keep the killings visible. Their repeated collision with forgetting and institutional silence makes impunity a condition of public life: the violence persists, while the means of naming it, counting it, and demanding an answer remain fragile.