Partido Revolucionario Institucional

The Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) appears in the Santa Teresa narrative as the political affiliation of the city’s mayor, José Refugio de las Heras. The novel does not describe the party’s internal structure or program; its significance here is the setting of local political authority against a record of violence, investigation, and institutional failure.

Local political context

At the close of 1993, the narrative identifies José Refugio de las Heras as Santa Teresa’s mayor and names the Partido Revolucionario Institucional as his party. He is described, together with Sonora governor José Andrés Briceño of the Partido Acción Nacional, as a decent and upright official prepared to do what was right and face unpleasantness. The passage establishes the PRI’s presence in city government, while offering no specific party action or policy in response to the killings.

A growing record of violence

The 1993 account places the mayor’s administration in the year the killings of women began to be counted in Sonora. The first listed victim is thirteen-year-old Esperanza Gomez Saldana, whose death is described as the beginning of the count, although the narrative warns that women may have been killed earlier and left unidentified or unrecorded. That distinction between a public chronology and possible prior, unregistered deaths limits what any official account can claim to have begun.

The handling of victims gives that uncertainty institutional form. Esperanza’s body passes through police stations, review by a judge and police officers, an examination by the police chief, and a hospital autopsy; the autopsy identifies the cause of death, but her identity is initially unknown. In another case, a woman found at a dump near a maquiladora is examined after company executives urge the police to remove her quickly, and one executive gives a policeman money. The episode links local authority not to a documented PRI directive, but to a wider environment in which the treatment of victims is shaped by unequal power and compromised policing.

Disposition of cases and bodies

The 1993 narrative also shows how an investigation can shift from seeking an account of one death to trying to attach another to a suspect. After Luisa Celina Vazquez is killed, her partner is arrested and questioned; police then continue to hold him while attempting to implicate him in Esperanza’s murder. The two cases are not thereby resolved as one, and the attempted connection underscores the gap between a count of deaths and a reliable explanation of them.

In 1994, an unidentified girl found near the city dump remains without a name despite police inquiries and photographs published in local newspapers. After two weeks, her body is sent to the University of Santa Teresa for medical students. This outcome contrasts with the initial efforts to identify and examine Esperanza: some bodies enter a chain of official investigation, while others, still unidentified, are redirected into medical use. The narrative supplies these contrasts as conditions surrounding local government, not as actions attributed directly to the PRI.

Limits of the party’s portrayal

The party is mentioned explicitly in connection with the mayor, but the novel does not establish that the PRI ordered, enabled, or prevented any particular murder or investigation. Nor does it describe a party response to the continuing killings. Its textual role is therefore narrow but pointed: the PRI names the political affiliation of the local executive in a landscape where the count of victims grows, identification remains uneven, and institutional procedures do not consistently produce justice.