Colonia Lomas del Toro is a Santa Teresa neighborhood connected to maquiladora employment and to several investigations into murdered women. The novel places it among the city’s working-class districts, where industrial labor and ordinary social life unfold alongside persistent violence and failures of identification and investigation.

Setting and Urban Context

The district appears within a city expanding unevenly around factories, poor neighborhoods, and undeveloped land. Santa Teresa’s northern and peripheral areas include industrial parks, unpaved streets, and neighborhoods formed around the maquiladoras; the city’s growth outpaces its infrastructure. Lomas del Toro is named among these districts, linking it to the broader landscape of industrial employment and precarious urban development.

Residents and Maquiladora Work

Silvana Perez Arjona lived with her mother and siblings, who worked at different maquiladoras. She had been the only one in her family attending school, but financial circumstances forced her to leave and take a job as a machine operator at Horizon W&E in the General Sepulveda industrial park. Her sister helped her find the position. Silvana’s experience makes the neighborhood part of a social world shaped by factory wages, family responsibilities, and constrained educational opportunities.

Another investigation brings Epifanio to the district in search of information about Estrella Ruiz Sandoval, who had worked at a maquiladora. He speaks with her friends, who describe their shared routines: watching films downtown, window-shopping, and visiting a mall in Colonia Centeno. Estrella had wanted to study computer skills rather than spend her life at factory work. These recollections give the district’s industrial setting a human scale, showing ambitions and friendships that police case files cannot fully contain.

Violence and Investigation

In November 1994, Silvana’s partially burned body was discovered in a vacant lot by women from Colonia Las Flores. The following day, investigators learned her identity and employment history. Her partner, Carlos Llanos, was arrested and admitted killing her; he was not, however, connected to other murders for which police initially questioned him. Silvana’s case thus joins the neighborhood to the femicide investigation while also exposing the difficulty of distinguishing an individual confession from the wider pattern of violence.

Lomas del Toro also enters the investigation through Estrella’s family. Epifanio questions her parents and siblings, then follows up with her older sister and former coworkers. Her friends explain that she had no boyfriend at the time and wanted a different future. The inquiry proceeds through family testimony and conversations outside the workplace, but these efforts take place amid a succession of other killings that continually draws police attention elsewhere.

Narrative Significance

The district is not presented as an isolated setting. Its connection to factory employment places it within Santa Teresa’s larger network of industrial parks, worker housing, and incomplete infrastructure; its presence in separate victims’ stories shows how investigations repeatedly return to the same social geography. Lomas del Toro is both a lived neighborhood, marked by work and personal aspirations, and part of a map through which the novel traces violence without reducing it to a single case or a single explanation.