Mary-Sue Bravo

Mary-Sue Bravo, a reporter for El Independiente de Phoenix, becomes one of the few journalists to pursue the gaps left by official accounts of the Santa Teresa murders. Her work first places her alongside the public dispute over Klaus Haas’s accusations; later, the disappearance of Josué Hernández Mercado, a reporter for La Raza de Green Valley, turns her attention toward the people who investigate the killings and the limits imposed on what can be known. Her reporting does not resolve either mystery. Instead, it reveals how the press, police, and political institutions can turn uncertainty into a reason to move on.

Reporting the Haas case

Bravo is in Santa Teresa when the story of Haas’s denunciation of the Uribe brothers reaches the press. Five of the six visiting reporters seek a police response before publication, and the police, like the national papers, reject the account as lacking credibility. The reporters also contact the Uribe family, who offer differing explanations for the brothers’ whereabouts. Bravo, writing for El Independiente de Phoenix, tries to reach Daniel Uribe’s father, Joaquin, but cannot secure an interview.

She also notices that the reporter from La Raza de Green Valley is the only journalist at the prison press conference who has not called the police for an official comment, leaving him more exposed to a possible lawsuit from the Uribe family and state agencies. Bravo later encounters him eating with a muscular man she takes for a police officer. She walks on, then turns back after a sudden presentiment; when she returns, the other man has left. The incident does not establish what the meeting meant, but it gives her a concrete image of the risks and ambiguities surrounding the reporting.

A week later, Bravo learns from La Raza that this reporter, Josué Hernández Mercado, has disappeared. The local notice says he had been missing for five days. He is thirty-two, an American citizen who moved to the United States at fifteen, and a journalist covering the killings in Santa Teresa. He has also published two books of poetry in Spanish and written plays in Chicano or Spanglish. The profile’s account of his life and work strikes Bravo as having the feel of an obituary, though it does not establish that he is dead.

Investigating a disappearance

Bravo asks her editor for permission to investigate Hernández Mercado’s disappearance. He treats the possibility of a serious mystery skeptically, speculating that the missing reporter has lost his mind or wandered into a state park. He nevertheless lets her pursue the story. Bravo travels first to Green Valley, where she speaks with La Raza’s editor and an eighteen- or possibly seventeen-year-old reporter who takes his work seriously, then goes with the younger journalist to Sonoita.

At Hernández Mercado’s house, the younger reporter lets Bravo in with a key he says is kept at the paper. The house is orderly, with no visible evidence of violence, and dust is gathering on the few pieces of furniture. The sheriff suggests that Hernández may have gone to California because he had debts, owed six months’ rent, and earned too little at the newspaper to support himself. The young reporter confirms that La Raza pays poorly, describing it as a paper for the people. The sheriff and Bravo visit the bus stop, but its ticket seller and regular passengers cannot say reliably whether Hernández boarded a bus on the day he disappeared.

Bravo asks whether the sheriff has checked Hernández’s computer. He has not, so she looks through the files herself. She finds the beginning of a mystery novel in Spanglish, published articles, sketches about seasonal laborers and farmworkers, and sensationalized pieces about Haas, but nothing that explains the disappearance. The investigation thus yields a set of possible reasons for leaving, not proof that Hernández left voluntarily. His empty home and inaccessible movements become part of the same unresolved record.

Journalism under pressure

Bravo’s reporting takes place in a city where public attention to the murders rises and recedes. An account heard by Jean-Claude Pelletier and Manuel Espinoza describes how reports and public discussion swell when the number of killings rises, then subside as people return to work. Chucho Flores similarly compares the killings to a strike: the renewed attention is temporary, and ordinary routines resume. These observations frame the conditions in which Bravo tries to keep individual cases in view.

The institutional record repeatedly narrows or loses what might have made the cases answerable. The killing of Isabel Urrea is publicly explained as a frustrated robbery, the work of a disturbed person or drug addict, or perhaps a Central American veteran seeking money to travel north. There is no autopsy, at the family’s request, and the ballistic analysis is never made public before it is lost in transit between the Santa Teresa and Hermosillo courts. In another case, the main suspect in Emilia Mena Mena’s killing has disappeared before police arrive; the case remains open and is soon forgotten. These details show the practical distance between a case being officially investigated and its remaining visible or solvable.

The same limits shape reporting on Haas. In January 1996 he again addresses the press from prison, asking how murders can continue while the alleged killer is incarcerated and drawing attention to the matching knots in the bindings of Michelle Requejo and Estrella Ruiz Sandoval. La Razón sends a novice crime reporter to cover the event. Its crime editor goes to the arts section to ask Bravo’s colleague Sergio Gonzalez whether he wants the assignment; Gonzalez declines and stays in Mexico City to write about new Mexican and Latin American fiction. Separately, the Santa Teresa branch of Women of Sonora for Democracy and Peace holds a press conference about the degrading treatment of victims’ families and announces letters to the governor and the attorney general. The letters receive no reply, though the organization’s local supporters grow from three to twenty. The contrast is between repeated attempts to make the killings publicly consequential and institutions that can deny, defer, or ignore those attempts.

The disappearance remains unresolved

Bravo’s own interpretation shifts as she considers what Hernández left behind. While reviewing his articles on Haas, she finds writing marked by clichés, inaccuracies, exaggerations, and outright lies: Haas appears at different moments as the scapegoat of a conspiracy or as a detective pursuing his tormentors from a cell. At first Bravo doubts that anyone would kill Hernández over such work. Her editor offers mundane alternatives: perhaps he became fed up, ran away, or simply left. When the younger reporter calls to ask about her planned story, Bravo says there is nothing to write and assumes Hernández is probably living and working in California.

The young reporter objects that Hernández would not have left his own books behind. Bravo initially answers that books are heavy and can be replaced, but then remembers the books in the living room and bedroom of the house. The distinction changes the weight of what she has seen: the abandoned volumes were not merely books he had owned, but copies of the poetry books he had written and published. The younger reporter insists they were like Hernández’s children and that he would not have abandoned them even if the world were ending. Bravo has no evidence that proves this interpretation, but she recognizes that she had not considered it before. His books do not disclose what happened to him; they make the easy explanation of a voluntary departure less secure.

A dream further unsettles the boundary between investigation and uncertainty. After reading online reports about the Uribes, Bravo dreams that a woman sits at the foot of her bed. She feels the weight of someone on the mattress but touches nothing when she reaches out. In the news she has read, Antonio Uribe is reported to have disappeared, while Daniel Uribe is in Tucson and calls Haas’s claims lies; Daniel gives no clear account of Antonio’s whereabouts. The next day Bravo calls Haas’s lawyer, Isabel Santolaya, partly because she feels compelled to hear her voice. Santolaya says Haas is as he has been for months and that she has read Daniel’s statements, but offers no suggested questions for Bravo’s planned interview. The dream and call do not solve the case. They place Bravo among partial reports, evasive answers, and the persistent presence of what remains unknown.