Juan Arredondo

Juan Arredondo is a medical examiner and university professor whose professional life unfolds amid Santa Teresa’s accumulating cases of murdered women. His profile combines ordinary attachments—to his wife and three children, to television and meals at home—with an appetite for professional travel and a recurring place in the silent routines of forensic work. Through that contrast, he belongs both to the city’s civic institutions and to the bleak labor through which its dead are examined.

Identity and Background

Arredondo is from Hermosillo, the capital of Sonora, and earned his degree at that city’s medical school. At forty-five, he is married to a woman from Santa Teresa and has three children. His political sympathies are with the left-wing PRO, though he has never been active in the party. Unlike his colleague Emilio Garibay, who studied in Mexico City, Arredondo’s professional formation is local to Sonora.

At the University of Santa Teresa, Arredondo divides his time between medical-examiner work and teaching. Students like him and regard him as a friend as well as a professor. Outside work, he most enjoys watching television and eating at home with his family, an uncomplicated domestic preference set against a working life repeatedly exposed to the city’s violence.

Work and Professional Ambition

Arredondo’s position gives him two kinds of institutional standing: he examines bodies and teaches students. His professional ambitions emerge most clearly when an invitation to a conference abroad arrives. Although he is ordinarily content with family life, such invitations excite him, and he does what he can to secure them. That desire for travel distinguishes him from the settled routines of his colleagues without making him an activist or a public intellectual.

The dean, a friend of Garibay’s, dislikes Arredondo and sometimes gives him an opportunity only out of contempt. Even this grudging access has taken him abroad: he has traveled three times to the United States, once to Spain, and once to Costa Rica. He also represented the Institute of Forensic Anatomy and the University of Santa Teresa at a symposium in Medellin, Colombia. After returning, he told his wife that they had no idea what was going on there, then offered no further explanation. The remark registers a disquieting encounter, but the narrative does not specify what he witnessed or learned.

The Forensic Routine

The three medical examiners sometimes meet for breakfast after their work, at Runaway, a twenty-four-hour American-style coffee shop near the General Sepulveda Hospital. The clientele includes hospital workers, ambulance drivers, patients’ relatives, sex workers, and students—people whose hours have carried them into the same early-morning interval. Arredondo usually orders cake with ice cream; Garibay orders steak, despite Arredondo’s warning that it is bad for his joints, while the younger Rigoberto Frias generally has little or nothing.

The breakfasts are marked less by conversation than by silence. Arredondo stares at the backs of his hands as if looking for a tiny trace of blood; Frias looks at the table or ceiling, and Garibay watches the street. Their stillness is described as a form of professional knowledge, the inward quiet of a job completed. After paying, they leave separately: one returns to the institute while the other two go to the underground garage, parting without saying goodbye. Arredondo drives away with both hands gripping the wheel. His professional world is thus rendered not as a dramatic investigation but as repetition, separation, and the physical residue of work.

The City’s Dead and Its Institutions

Arredondo’s work belongs to a city whose growth is inseparable from its industrial and infrastructural inequalities. Santa Teresa has factories, maquiladoras, and cross-border commercial traffic, but its urban infrastructure cannot support its demographic expansion. In the city’s periphery, industrial parks are surrounded by poor neighborhoods; a gully has become a garbage dump, and the horizon is marked by maquiladoras. The pressures shaping the city are not background scenery alone: they define the places where women work, travel, disappear, and are found.

The early sequence of killings shows the institutional process through which those deaths are handled. When thirteen-year-old Esperanza Gomez Saldana is found, police officers and the chief examine her, a judge identifies strangulation as the apparent cause, and the medical examiner performs an autopsy. The examination establishes that she had been strangled and subjected to sexual violence; after the autopsy, her body is placed in a freezer by a hospital orderly. Five days later, Luisa Celina Vazquez is found strangled in her home. Police arrest her partner and his friend; the friend confesses to killing her, but investigators then keep questioning him in an effort to connect him to Esperanza’s earlier death. He refuses to implicate himself in that separate case. The sequence exposes the gap between a confession to one murder and the police effort to attach a suspect to another.

Other cases make the limits and unevenness of official knowledge visible. At a dump where maquiladora waste mingles with the garbage of nearby poor residents, executives wait for police to remove a woman’s body; one hands a policeman money, which the officer puts in his pocket. The subsequent autopsy finds that the unidentified woman had been strangled and raped and was five months pregnant. In another case, a woman found on a school field is never identified; the examiner can only estimate her age and report the likely cause of death, while the body is removed after the school community has gathered nearby. A girl found at the city dump is likewise unidentified, and after unsuccessful efforts to recognize her, her body is sent to the University of Santa Teresa’s medical students. Such cases place forensic examination alongside bribery, incomplete identification, and the conversion of an unclaimed body into teaching material.

Narrative Role and Significance

Arredondo is not presented as the solver of the Santa Teresa murders, and the available scenes do not give him a personal investigation or a decisive confrontation. His significance is instead institutional and cumulative. He is one of the professionals who must continue teaching and examining bodies while the city’s killings recur, and his habits—looking at his hands, keeping silent over breakfast, driving away alone—give the work a muted human scale without turning him into a heroic exception.

The novel also sets the examiners’ silence against the crude, misogynistic jokes told by police officers over breakfast elsewhere in the city. The contrast does not make Arredondo a declared opponent of that culture; the evidence offers no such statement. It does, however, distinguish the forensic trio’s inward, work-centered quiet from a police social world in which women are routinely reduced to the objects of jokes. Arredondo’s position therefore marks an uneasy boundary: he serves a system that records and examines women’s deaths, while the narrative shows how little that procedural attention alone can do to overcome the wider conditions of neglect, impunity, and recurring violence.