Santa Teresa’s security order infiltrated by the drug trade

Santa Teresa’s security order is not separate from the drug trade: it is entangled with the city’s transport networks, business interests, police institutions, and the everyday lives of its residents. The novel presents a border city where legal and illegal flows share routes and infrastructure, where criminal alliances can shape official action, and where violence becomes one more feature of a rapidly expanding urban landscape.

A Border City Built on Unequal Flows

Santa Teresa’s geography makes circulation visible. The city’s northern edge meets the fence separating Mexico from the United States; beyond its neighborhoods and industrial parks lie highways, rail lines, and the desert. On its southern side, slum soccer fields sit among shacks, while industrial warehouses mark the horizon of the maquiladoras. To the west, industrial parks are themselves being surrounded by poor neighborhoods. The city appears to grow continuously, its infrastructure unable to keep pace with its expansion.

That landscape is also an economic system. Chucho Flores describes a city with factories, maquiladoras, low unemployment, a cocaine cartel, and a constant inflow of workers from elsewhere, including Central American immigrants. Santa Teresa has both money and poverty, he says, alongside an urban infrastructure inadequate to demographic growth. His account does not treat the cartel as an external force arriving in an otherwise orderly city; it places drug trafficking within the same crowded inventory as manufacturing, labor migration, and civic administration.

The border crossing makes that overlap concrete. On the American side, Fate passes through Adobe, a settlement of houses and appliance stores arranged along a main street that ends at the border post. After crossing the short distance to the Mexican post, he must leave his car, open his suitcase, and present his papers. The fence divides the countries, but the story’s traffic—workers, goods, news, and drugs—keeps the border central to Santa Teresa’s social and economic order.

Cartel Networks and Local Power

The account of Enrique Hernandez shows how criminal authority develops through changing alliances. Hernandez, known as Enriquito, had worked for Pedro Rengifo and later Estanislao Campuzano. He built a base in Cananea, with a ranch, a house, local associates, five trucks, and three Suburbans. He was believed to move drugs arriving by sea along the Sonora coast to Santa Teresa, where another transporter handled the next leg into the United States.

Hernandez’s position changed when he sought independence. A Salvadoran trafficker connected him with a Colombian, turning him from Campuzano’s transport manager into a competitor. Campuzano’s much larger volume of business did not prevent retaliation: the narrative stresses that resentment is not measured by market share. Rather than expose Hernandez directly, Campuzano waited for an opportunity to remove him through legal channels. After Hernandez killed four members of one family in a dispute involving a woman, Campuzano supplied money and information to the Sonora attorney general’s office, and Hernandez was imprisoned.

The subsequent attacks on Campuzano’s shipments show the fragility of this arrangement. A hundred kilos of cocaine were stolen from a warehouse in northern Sinaloa, and a black Suburban resembling the vehicles used by Hernandez’s men was reported nearby. Later, a truck carrying twenty kilos was attacked on the road toward the border; its driver and companion were killed, and both the men and the drugs disappeared. The truck eventually turned up wrecked in a Hermosillo scrapyard. These incidents leave evidence that is suggestive but incomplete: a vehicle resemblance, secondhand accounts, and a damaged truck do not establish who organized the attacks.

A rule of the trade captures the discipline imposed by this cross-border business: a shipment is not carried with weapons, because the men transporting drugs across the border do not travel armed. The rule does not make the route safe; it defines the risks and procedures within which the traffic continues. Criminal logistics depend on separation, handoffs, and knowledge of the border as much as on force.

Policing, Protection, and Complicity

The police appear inside the same network of relationships that governs the drug trade. Inspectors discussing Klaus Haas’s press conference speculate that the prison warden had been bribed or pressured, and one names Enriquito Hernandez as the person who may have twisted the warden’s arm. The scene does not establish the allegation as fact, but it shows officers interpreting access to the prison through the language of money and influence.

Juan de Dios Martinez’s questions about Hernandez and Haas sharpen the uncertainty. He wonders why Hernandez might be protecting Haas, what he might gain, whom the protection harms, and how long it will last. Friendship briefly enters his list of possible explanations, but he dismisses it on the grounds that Hernandez has no friends. The unresolved questions matter: protection is treated as a practical possibility, yet the motives and terms remain obscure. The security order is defined not only by proven arrangements but also by the difficulty of distinguishing patronage, coercion, business calculation, and personal loyalty.

The scale of criminal influence extends beyond a single transporter. At a prison press conference, Haas identifies Antonio and Daniel Uribe as the serial killers and describes their powerful family connections: one father owns more than a hundred cargo trucks carrying maquiladora merchandise across the border every half hour or hour, while the other has hotels and coffee shops. Both sons, Haas says, are protégés of Fabio Izquierdo, who works for Campuzano; their social circle includes wealthy men, police officers, and traffickers. These claims are presented through Haas’s public accusation, not as a judicial finding. Even so, the details suggest how legitimate businesses and cross-border infrastructure can coexist with alleged criminal power, while family, money, and police connections make the boundaries difficult to police.

The Murders and Their Unequal Visibility

The city’s disorder is also registered through the recurring murders of women. A young man tells Pelletier and Espinoza that more than two hundred women have been killed since 1993 or 1994, perhaps as many as 250 or 300, and that the true number may never be known. Their initial disbelief becomes part of the passage’s concern with how people receive disturbing information: disbelief can function as a polite form of exaggeration, a way of prompting confirmation while holding the fact at a distance.

The case of Margarita Lopez Santos gives that accumulated number a specific setting. She was sixteen and worked the night shift at K&T, a maquiladora in the El Progreso industrial park. Her disappearance was reported by her mother on the second day. Margarita left work at about five-thirty in the morning, when it was still dark, and began the roughly fifty-minute walk home. The surrounding roads lacked adequate lighting, paving, and drainage; many houses nearby had no electricity. More than forty days later, children found her body near a shack in Colonia Maytorena. The narrative reconstructs parts of her route but cannot say where or how she disappeared. The uncertainty remains; the account does not turn hazardous conditions into an explanation of her death or a judgment about her choices.

The public response to the killings follows a cycle of attention and forgetting. Chucho Flores describes the rising numbers as news that briefly gathers reporters and public discussion, then fades as daily life resumes. He compares the killings to a brutal strike: an interruption that people eventually absorb and work around. As he speaks, he draws women’s faces in a notebook, quickly and intently; none smiles, and some appear to be waiting for someone to call their names. The sketches give form to the people behind the count without resolving the violence that has made them a recurring subject of news.

Reporting and the Limits of Accountability

The novel also shows how the murders struggle to become an enduring public story. Sergio Gonzalez recalls that the explanation offered by a crime reporter—that Santa Teresa was a center of the drug trade and that nothing there was likely unrelated to it—seemed obvious, yet remained in his mind. The simplicity of the explanation does not settle the question of responsibility; it risks making the connection between crime and trafficking so general that particular acts and failures disappear into it.

Oscar Fate encounters another limit when he tries to report from Santa Teresa. His editor tells him there is no interest in, or budget for, the proposed story and instructs him to finish his boxing assignment and return. In a later call, Fate describes the killings, possible serial perpetrators, drug trafficking, the border, police corruption, and the city’s growth, asking for another week to gather material. His editor insists that he is there to cover a boxing match. Fate argues that the killings matter more. The competing assignments make editorial control part of the security landscape: the violence is visible enough to provoke a reporter’s proposal, but not enough to secure the time and resources he seeks.

That struggle is set against a city where police, traffickers, commercial transport, and public reporting repeatedly cross one another’s paths. The narrative does not provide a single explanation that resolves the murders or a clean account of institutional responsibility. Instead, it depicts a system in which cross-border wealth and movement coexist with weak infrastructure, criminal influence, contested police action, and brief, receding bursts of attention. Santa Teresa’s security crisis lies in that coexistence—and in the way its ordinary routines continue around it.