La Razón

La Razón is a Mexico City newspaper that connects arts writer Sergio Gonzalez’s reporting career to the unfolding violence in Santa Teresa. Its role is more than that of a source of information: the paper assigns stories, shapes which subjects its reporters can pursue, and becomes a channel through which the city’s murders are intermittently brought to public attention.

The Assignment to Santa Teresa

In July 1993, La Razón’s Sunday-magazine editor offered Gonzalez a story about the Penitent, a suspected church desecrator in Santa Teresa. Gonzalez, thirty-five and recently divorced, was an arts writer who reviewed philosophy books and covered art and music; after his divorce left him short of money, he had been seeking extra assignments from other sections. The editor valued his work and saw the commission as a way for Gonzalez to earn additional income while taking a few days away from Mexico City.

Gonzalez traveled by air to Hermosillo and continued by bus to Santa Teresa. He visited churches that had been desecrated, spoke with priests and local reporters, and obtained a police sketch and a folder of background material. Inspector Juan de Dios Martinez told him off the record that the Penitent suffered from sacraphobia, a fear or hatred of sacred objects, and that the deaths associated with the church attacks had not been premeditated. Gonzalez filed his story with the Sunday-magazine editor after returning to Mexico City, then promptly put the assignment out of mind.

A Crime Story and Its Limits

The Penitent assignment placed a reporter from the arts pages inside a city whose broader violence was already difficult to grasp. During the visit, Gonzalez encountered the ordinary routines of the police office as well as the official account of the case; the story he took back to La Razón centered on the Penitent, while the city’s more extensive crisis remained beyond the scope of that commission. His quick return to Mexico City and his decision to forget the episode mark a sharp limit to the paper’s first engagement with Santa Teresa.

The women’s killings nevertheless entered the paper’s orbit through other encounters. Jean-Claude Pelletier and Manuel Espinoza heard from a local boy that more than two hundred women had died between 1993 or 1994 and the present, with the true count possibly higher. Later, Chucho Flores described the way reports of rising numbers briefly revived public discussion: attention swelled, then faded, and people returned to work. His account presents news coverage as cyclical, with the murders becoming conspicuous again when the count rose but losing urgency once the moment passed.

Editors, Reporters, and News Priorities

The limits of assignment become explicit in Oscar Fate’s effort to report on the killings. After pitching a story about the women murdered in Santa Teresa, Fate learned that his editor had no interest in it or no budget, and was told to finish the sports assignment and return to New York. When Fate reached the editor by phone, he argued that the killings, possible serial perpetrators, drug trafficking, the border, police corruption, and the city’s rapid growth warranted a substantial investigation. The editor insisted that Fate was there to cover a boxing match; Fate maintained that the murders mattered more.

La Razón’s later coverage also depended on who was available and willing to take the assignment. In January 1996, after Klaus Haas called another press conference from prison and questioned why murders continued if he were the killer, the paper sent a novice crime reporter to Santa Teresa. The reporter read the case file on the flight, including Gonzalez’s earlier stories. Gonzalez himself remained in Mexico City, where he was writing a long article on new Mexican and Latin American fiction; when the crime editor asked whether he wanted to go, he declined. The paper’s reporting therefore returned to the case through a junior correspondent, while its experienced arts writer stayed with a different assignment.

Journalism and the City’s Uneven Visibility

Santa Teresa’s physical and economic landscape gives the newspaper’s coverage a wider context. The city’s outskirts included impoverished districts, industrial parks surrounded by slums, and the horizon of maquiladora warehouses; at the border, the movement of goods and people linked local life to the United States. Chucho Flores described a city combining factories, low unemployment, a cocaine cartel, migration, poverty, money, and infrastructure unable to keep pace with population growth. In this setting, the murders were not isolated from the systems around them, even when a particular assignment treated them as a discrete crime story.

La Razón’s place in the novel is defined by this tension between reporting and omission. Its pages carry information from Santa Teresa, but assignments and resources determine which accounts are pursued, who is sent, and how long a story remains in view. The newspaper’s changing involvement—from Gonzalez’s brief Penitent commission to the later dispatch of a novice crime reporter—echoes the public cycle described by Flores: the killings return to attention, but attention itself proves difficult to sustain.