Pedro Negrete
2666Pedro Negrete, the police chief of Santa Teresa, is presented through a tension between the office he holds and the personal networks through which he exercises it. He oversees investigations into women’s deaths, yet the cases repeatedly lose momentum or are reduced to isolated explanations. At the same time, he recruits Lalo Cura for a powerful friend, later retrieves him after a violent confrontation, and ultimately asks whether the young man wants to join the police. Negrete’s authority is therefore both institutional and intimate: he can direct police action, but he also treats people as protégés whose paths he can arrange.
Identity and Authority
Negrete appears in the early investigation of Esperanza Gomez Saldana, a thirteen-year-old whose body is taken first to a police station and then to the city hospital morgue. After the judge and officers have examined her, Negrete arrives with two deputies, inspects the body again, and asks what the officials have concluded and whether they know who she is. The judge identifies strangulation as the cause of death; the officers do not know the victim’s identity. Negrete says they will find out and leaves with the judge. His deputy then tries to summon the officers who first found the girl, only to learn they have returned to patrol. The scene establishes a chain of command, but also shows how quickly a case can disperse back into routine.
The novel places that police work in a city expanding faster than its infrastructure can support. Santa Teresa has factories and maquiladoras, a flow of workers and immigrants, drug trafficking, and stark wealth and poverty; Chucho Flores describes its defining shortage as time. The city’s industrial horizon and sprawling neighborhoods give Negrete’s office a setting where rapid growth and weak capacity coexist. The police chief is one agent within that strained order, not an authority standing outside it.
Investigations and the Limits of Accountability
Negrete’s authority is tested by the handling of victims whose identities or circumstances remain unresolved. After an unidentified woman is found on the slopes of Cerro Estrella, newspapers publish her photographs, but no one comes forward. Four days later, Negrete goes to the discovery site alone, without even Epifanio Galindo. He examines the place where the body was found, climbs the hill, and looks across the surrounding settlement, highway, desert, and open plain. His solitary visit gives the investigation a physical setting, but does not produce an identification in the account. The victim remains unknown, while the landscape around the city seems to open into further spaces of neglect and disappearance.
In another case, the killing of Emilia Mena Mena is attributed to her boyfriend, who has already disappeared when police seek him. His relatives provide an alleged destination, but officers searching there find no trace of him. The case remains open and is soon forgotten; five days after the body is found, another dead woman is discovered on school grounds near the border and the shells of maquiladora buildings. The sequence makes the limits of police resolution concrete: a suspect can vanish, a case can be left unfinished, and another death can arrive before the first has been settled.
The same institutional uncertainty extends beyond the cases Negrete personally inspects. After reporter Isabel Urrea is killed, the incident is explained as a thwarted robbery, the work of a lunatic or drug user, or possibly an act by a Central American veteran seeking money to reach the United States. No autopsy is conducted at the family’s request, and the ballistic analysis is later lost while in transit between Santa Teresa and Hermosillo. The changing explanations and missing evidence show how an individual death can be filed away without a conclusive account. They do not establish Negrete’s personal responsibility for that investigation, but they define the broader police and legal environment in which he serves.
Patronage and Lalo Cura
Negrete’s relationship with Lalo Cura begins as an act of recruitment. He travels to Villaviciosa to find someone trustworthy for his old friend Pedro Rengifo. He questions several young men about whether they can shoot, whether they can be relied upon, and whether they want to earn money. After choosing the youngest, he privately asks Epifanio what he thinks. The boy is selected without ceremony; an old man tells him to say goodbye to his mother, and he leaves without doing so. The episode shows Negrete using a deliberate process of judgment, but the purpose is to place a young recruit in a friend’s service rather than in the police force.
Months later, Lalo is wounded during an attack on Rengifo’s household and arrested after shooting assailants, one of whom is a state judicial police inspector. Negrete arrives at the precinct with Epifanio, finds Lalo in a basement cell, and orders that his handcuffs be removed. When officers explain that Lalo shot the inspector and another gunman, Negrete argues that the boy acted under shock and that the dead inspector would have killed him if given the chance. The confrontation reveals Negrete’s ability to override the immediate treatment of a suspect: instead of allowing the arrest to define Lalo, he reframes the shooting as survival and removes him from custody.
A month later, Negrete returns to Rengifo’s ranch and demands Lalo’s return. He says that he had entrusted the boy to Rengifo and is now taking him back because of how he has been treated. Negrete objects that Lalo was assigned to inexperienced men rather than being allowed to learn from an experienced figure. Rengifo agrees to release him, and Negrete asks after the household and businesses before arranging the boy’s departure. On the way back to Santa Teresa, he asks whether Lalo would like to join the police; Lalo nods. Negrete’s protection thus becomes recruitment, completing a movement from selecting the boy for a friend to drawing him toward the police force.
The City and Its Uneven Systems
The novel’s broader portrait of Santa Teresa clarifies what Negrete’s authority can and cannot accomplish. The city stretches from unpaved poor neighborhoods and neglected plazas to middle-class districts, industrial parks, highways, rail lines, and border crossings. At its outskirts, black vultures move through barren fields; beyond the fence to the north lies the Arizona desert. The industrial warehouses and maquiladoras appear not as a separate world but as part of the same urban expanse as shantytowns, vacant lots, and makeshift settlements. These details give the investigations a geography in which work, migration, commerce, poverty, and danger are closely adjacent.
Cross-border movement also complicates the idea of a bounded police jurisdiction. Oscar Fate passes through an American border town and then the Mexican checkpoint, where officers inspect his documents and the high fence divides the two countries. Elsewhere, Pedro Uribe’s more than one hundred cargo trucks carry merchandise from maquiladoras in Hermosillo and Santa Teresa across the border every half hour or hour; the family also has property in Phoenix and Tucson. The account does not make Negrete responsible for these networks, but places the police chief in a region where legitimate trade, drug trafficking, and mobility across jurisdictions shape the conditions of public order.
Narrative Role and Significance
Negrete is neither presented as a detached investigator who solves the city’s crimes nor reduced to a simple emblem of police failure. His early appearance is procedural: he examines a victim, asks for a name, and expects the officers to continue the search. Later, he acts decisively for Lalo, using his rank to end the young man’s detention and his personal connections to reclaim him from Rengifo. These contrasting actions make his position legible as a blend of public authority and private obligation.
That blend matters in a narrative where deaths can become statistics, suspects can disappear, and evidence can be lost. Negrete’s intervention gives one young man a route out of a compromised arrangement, but the broader pattern of unresolved killings remains. His eventual offer of police work to Lalo is both an act of personal sponsorship and an entry into the very institution whose capacity the surrounding cases place in doubt. The character therefore links the city’s intimate networks to its failing systems of investigation, without suggesting that one personal gesture can repair the larger crisis.
