Santa Teresa’s femicide crisis

Santa Teresa’s femicide crisis is the accumulating pattern of women’s killings and disappearances that the novel follows from January 1993 through 1997. Rather than presenting the deaths as a single solved crime, it sets them amid an expanding border city and shows how poor records, abandoned investigations, and inconsistent public attention leave victims exposed to violence and their cases liable to vanish. The crisis is at once a sequence of individual losses and a measure of what the city’s institutions and ordinary routines fail to see.

The city and the conditions of the crisis

Santa Teresa’s geography makes the violence inseparable from the city’s growth. Its neighborhoods run outward from crowded streets of bars, souvenir shops, and small hotels to poorer districts, vacant lots, shacks, rail lines, and industrial warehouses. A gully has become a garbage dump; slum soccer fields sit near the tracks; maquiladoras mark the horizon. The city appears endless, yet its edges are full of neglected and unfinished spaces where people and evidence can disappear.

The outward expansion does not follow a uniform plan. Eastward, middle-class neighborhoods give way to slums across hills, valleys, dry riverbeds, and the remains of old ranches. To the north, a fence separates Mexico from the United States and faces the Arizona desert; in the west, industrial parks are themselves ringed by slums. On the American side, Adobe consists largely of houses and appliance stores along a main street, ending at a brightly lit empty lot beside the border post. Crossing into Mexico, Oscar Fate has to leave his car, open his suitcase, and present his documents at the checkpoint. The long fence, exhausted officials, and routine border inspection form part of the same landscape through which workers, goods, and information move, even as the jurisdictional boundary complicates what can be known or pursued.

Chucho Flores describes Santa Teresa as a place of factories, maquiladoras, low unemployment, a cocaine cartel, and a constant influx of workers from other cities and Central American immigrants. Its infrastructure, he says, cannot sustain the pace of demographic growth: money and poverty, bureaucracy and violence, and the desire to work in peace coexist. That contrast helps explain why the city’s official image of employment and expansion sits alongside dark routes, under-serviced neighborhoods, and vulnerable residents rather than displacing them.

The first counted deaths

The narrative dates the beginning of the recorded killings to January 1993, when thirteen-year-old Esperanza Gomez Saldana was found dead in a vacant lot in Colonia Las Flores. Children playing there alerted their parents, and a mother called the police, who arrived about half an hour later. The lot lay between streets and a ditch, with the ruined walls of an abandoned dairy beyond it. Two women were kneeling in the weeds beside the body, praying. The account identifies Esperanza as the first victim on the 1993 list, but immediately questions the apparent clarity of that starting point: other girls and women may have died in 1992, uncounted because they were never found or were buried or disposed of without leaving a trace.

That uncertainty is fundamental to the crisis. A list can give deaths an order and a beginning, but it cannot recover everyone omitted from it. The act of counting makes some victims legible while exposing the limits of the record itself. In the novel, the number of known cases is therefore not a complete measure of the violence; it is also an account of what the city has failed to register.

The investigation of Isabel Urrea’s murder demonstrates how quickly a case can be reduced to competing explanations and then lose its evidentiary basis. Her local radio station and newspaper covered the killing for three days. It was variously described as a frustrated robbery, the work of a lunatic or drug addict, or an attack by a Central American war veteran seeking money to reach the United States. No autopsy was conducted, at the family’s request, and the ballistic analysis was never made public and was later lost in transit between the courts of Santa Teresa and Hermosillo. The case’s unanswered questions thus persist alongside concrete administrative failures: an examination not performed and evidence that disappears from official custody.

Work, exposure, and abandoned investigations

The crisis reaches into the daily journeys of industrial workers. Colonia Guadalupe Victoria has no electricity, and roads leading out of the industrial park—apart from the road to the Nogales highway—lack adequate lighting, paving, and drainage. Waste from the industrial park accumulates in Colonia Las Rositas, where it forms a mud lake that turns white in the sun. Margarita Lopez leaves work at five-thirty and sets off along the dark streets. A pickup selling coffee, soft drinks, and sandwiches waits near the WS-Inc. maquiladora for workers arriving and leaving, most of them women. The narrative distinguishes what is established from what cannot be known: Margarita’s departure time is certain, while whether she saw the truck or stopped there is not. Her route makes the material conditions of women’s movement visible without pretending the record can reconstruct every moment of her disappearance.

The victims’ circumstances also reveal how industrial employment and household precarity overlap. Penelope Mendez Becerra is eleven, the youngest child in a family whose mother and sixteen-year-old sister work at Interzone-Berny. Her fifteen-year-old brother is a bakery messenger; she is the only sibling still in school. Their father left seven years earlier. Before the family moved to Colonia Veracruz, they lived near the Arsenio Farrell industrial park in a house he had assembled from cardboard, bricks, and zinc beside an unfinished drainage trench dug by two maquiladora companies. Both parents had migrated north from Hidalgo in 1985 in search of work. The account situates Penelope’s life within migration, insecure housing, industrial employment, and infrastructure left incomplete, rather than treating her murder as detached from the conditions around her.

The handling of Penelope’s case compounds the violence of her death with institutional retreat. A second autopsy reported that she died of a heart attack while undergoing the abuse described in the examination. Around the same period, Juan de Dios Martinez was ordered away from the Penitent investigation and assigned to armed robberies in Colonia Centeno and Colonia Podesta. He was told the earlier case was not formally closed, but that the suspected offender seemed to have vanished, the investigation had stalled, and the limited number of investigators required prioritizing other matters. Officers who had been watching the city’s churches around the clock were redirected to work considered more beneficial to public security. Martinez accepted the order without protest; the case remained nominally open while its resources and attention were withdrawn.

A similar pattern follows Emilia Mena Mena’s killing. Her boyfriend was the main suspect, but he had left before police reached the family home. His relatives said he had boarded a bus shortly before the body was found. The father and two brothers were detained for several days; the address they supplied, in Ciudad Guzman, led nowhere when officers visited with warrants. The case remained open and was soon forgotten. Five days after Emilia’s body was found, while the investigation was still unresolved, a school janitor discovered another dead woman. The succession of cases does not produce a sustained investigative response: one file fades as another death enters the record.

Repeated discoveries and the limits of identification

The 1997 accounts return again and again to marginal sites: sewage ditches, vacant lots, roadsides, fields, and ground near industrial or transport corridors. In July, a woman estimated to be between twenty and twenty-five was found in a sewage ditch east of Colonia Maytorena, where she had lain for at least three months. She had been bound with plastic cord. Among the objects recorded with her were a long black velvet glove, two rings—including one shaped like a snake—and a man’s Tracy-brand sock. Such specific details enter the file, but they do not by themselves supply the woman’s identity or explain what happened to her.

In September, eighteen-year-old Ana Munoz Sanjuan was found behind trash cans on Calle Javier Paredes. She lived with three other women in Colonia Ruben Dario and worked as a waitress at El Gran Chaparral in Santa Teresa’s historic district. Her disappearance had not been reported to the police. The last people known to have been with her were three individuals identified as El Mono, El Tamaulipas, and La Vieja; attempts to find them failed, and the case was shelved. In another September discovery, Maria Estela Ramos was found in an empty lot in Colonia Sur, wrapped in a quilt and black plastic. Juan de Dios Martinez placed the dumping between midnight and one-thirty, the interval when, unlike the rest of the time, the lot had been unoccupied by drug dealers, their clients, or groups of teenagers listening to music. Ramos lived in Colonia Veracruz, was twenty-three, had a four-year-old son, and shared a house with fellow maquiladora workers. The investigation could narrow the time and place of disposal without making the circumstances of her death fully intelligible.

Other discoveries show how identification can depend on a missing-person report or on distinctive information that still may not resolve a case. On October 7, a girl estimated to be fourteen to sixteen was found near railroad tracks and baseball fields. The medical examiner identified strangulation as the cause of death; the victim carried no identification, and a physical difference noted during the examination did not promptly lead to her identification. Four days later, Leticia Borrego Garcia, eighteen, was found partly buried near the Pemex soccer fields, between the Cananea highway and the railroad. Her mother identified her and had reported her missing a month earlier. Lalo Cura remained at the site, questioning why the body had been buried there beside the fields rather than left along the highway or among old railroad warehouses. The scene gives him questions, not answers about the killer’s intentions.

On October 14, another woman was found beside a dirt road between Colonia Estrella and the ranches on the outskirts of Santa Teresa. The investigation recorded her clothing and an electrical cord around her neck, but the case is not given a conclusion in the evidence presented here. On November 16, a woman estimated to be eighteen to twenty-two was discovered on the back lot of the Kusai maquiladora in Colonia San Bartolome. Her parents identified her two days later as Rosario Marquina, nineteen, who had disappeared while dancing at Salon Montana on November 12. Both she and her parents worked at Kusai. Here, as elsewhere, a workplace connects family members to the city’s industrial economy, while an ordinary night out becomes the last known point in a woman’s movements.

The November 25 killing of Maria Elena Torres places the crisis directly beside public protest. Two days earlier, Torres had marched from the university to city hall in a demonstration against the killings and the climate of impunity, organized by Women of Sonora for Democracy and Peace with NGOs, the PRD, and student groups. Authorities estimated that no more than five thousand people took part; organizers claimed more than sixty thousand. Torres was among the marchers. Two days later she was found dead in her home in Colonia Ruben Dario. The discrepancy in the crowd estimates registers a struggle over public visibility even as the killing of a participant makes that struggle painfully immediate.

Public attention, impunity, and continuation

The march demonstrates that the murders have become a public and political issue, but the gap between the organizers’ estimate and the authorities’ figure shows that even the scale of collective protest is contested. Earlier, the local branch of Women of Sonora for Democracy and Peace had held a press conference attended by only two local reporters. Its members described the degrading treatment of dead women’s relatives and presented letters intended for the state governor and the attorney general; the letters received no answers. Although the group grew from three members to twenty activists and supporters, its appeal did not translate into a visible institutional response. The public record thus includes not only deaths but also attempts to demand recognition that meet silence or minimization.

The crisis continues at the end of 1997. In the final case of that year, a bag containing a woman’s body was found on the city’s eastern edge beside a dirt road that ran along the border and disappeared toward the mountains. The victim had been dead for a long time. Investigators described her as about eighteen and recorded high heels and underwear among the contents of the bag; the police closed this case and the preceding one after three days of generally halfhearted investigation. The surrounding city then observes Christmas in its usual way, with posadas, piñatas, tequila, and beer, even on its poorest streets. That juxtaposition does not make the murders cease; it shows how they persist alongside routine celebration, absorbed into a city that keeps going without resolving what has happened.

The novel’s account therefore resists a neat chronology with a definitive beginning, a single perpetrator, or a final solution. January 1993 marks the point when killings begin to be counted, not proof that the violence began then. As years pass, the cases retain fragments—names, workplaces, streets, clothing, missing reports, lost analyses, abandoned leads—while identification and accountability remain uneven. Santa Teresa’s femicide crisis takes shape in the distance between those fragments and the institutions that might connect them: a distance widened by urban neglect, contested public attention, and investigations repeatedly left unfinished.