Sonora TV

Sonora TV is a regional television broadcaster and, in the Santa Teresa killings narrative, an imperfect channel through which local violence becomes publicly speakable. Its program An Hour with Reinaldo gives the herbalist Florita Almada a platform; during her first appearance, a trance leads her to name Santa Teresa and denounce the killings and police inaction. Yet reception in Santa Teresa is poor, and the public warning does not itself bring protection or resolution. The station thus links broadcast visibility to the novel’s larger concern with how easily violence can be reported, seen, and then left unanswered.

Role and Reach

Sonora TV’s studios are in Hermosillo, and its signal sometimes reaches Santa Teresa clearly and sometimes breaks up into ghostly images and background noise. The distinction matters in Florita’s first appearance: although An Hour with Reinaldo is among the state’s most popular programs, almost no one in Santa Teresa sees her debut because reception there is so poor. A televised warning can therefore be powerful in its content and limited in its actual audience at the same time.

The station also sits within a regional landscape where news, work, and people cross boundaries. The city’s industrial horizon is marked by maquiladoras, while a border crossing leads from the American town of Adobe to Mexico. This wider setting helps explain the broadcaster’s reach as regional rather than confined to Santa Teresa: its signal can travel across distance, but neither broadcast nor border infrastructure guarantees that a message reaches the people most affected.

An Hour with Reinaldo and Florita Almada

Florita, seventy years old, had only recently begun to call herself a seer, though she placed more faith in herbs, flowers, healthy eating, and prayer. Reinaldo had asked her to appear before, but she initially declined. She later contacted him herself, saying she had a message to make public, and he found her a place on the program. Her first broadcast followed a ventriloquist from Guaymas, whose performance and discussion of his dummy’s apparent independence had already unsettled the show’s light entertainment frame.

Florita first responded to the ventriloquist as a person needing practical advice, recommending that he consult an acupuncturist with knowledge of craniopuncture. She then began describing a vision of dead women and girls, a desert, an oasis, and a northern city where girls were being killed. As she struggled to continue, she recognized that she was entering a trance. Reinaldo asked whether she felt all right and offered to have an assistant bring water, but she could not stop the episode from taking hold.

In the trance she named Santa Teresa and said that women were being killed there. She called the victims her daughters, accused the police of doing nothing, and urged that the state governor be informed. In different voices, she spoke of women and girls being killed and of some being taken away in black cars. Her appeal transformed a regional television appearance into an accusation directed at authorities and a demand that the silence surrounding the killings be broken. She then leaped from her chair and fell to the floor; when Reinaldo and the ventriloquist tried to help her, she told them not to touch her. Soon afterward she rose, asked Reinaldo what had happened, and apologized to the camera.

Reappearance and Limits of the Broadcast

Florita’s later appearances show that Sonora TV did not turn her into a single-purpose voice of prophecy. In a second appearance, at Reinaldo’s request, she discussed three books she had written and published. She described having been illiterate until after twenty and spoke about her unfulfilled wish to become a teacher, imagining a school on a hill where she could help children encounter culture and learning. Her account placed her public role alongside a private educational aspiration and her work as an herbalist.

In October, she returned to An Hour with Reinaldo with a more alarming message. She said that her friends, whom she sometimes called protectors, had told her the crimes would continue and warned her to be careful. When she tried to speak to the spirit of a victim before the cameras, she fainted. Reinaldo initially believed the collapse was feigned and tried to rouse her, but it was a genuine blackout, and she ended up in the hospital. The episode exposes a limit of television’s frame: the studio can transmit a performance, but it cannot reliably distinguish staged behavior from physical crisis while it is unfolding.

Media, Violence, and Public Attention

The novel places television’s moments of attention against a recurring cycle of coverage and forgetting. Chucho Flores tells Oscar Fate that the numbers of women killed rise, the issue returns to the news, and public discussion swells before fading as people go back to work. He compares the killings to a brutal strike, but unlike an ordinary labor stoppage, the violence does not resolve through a visible negotiation or a return to normal conditions. His account makes the broadcaster’s role consequential but limited: attention can renew recognition of the crisis without changing the conditions that allow it to continue.

That gap is sharpened by the contrast between Florita’s specific televised warning and Santa Teresa’s expanding institutional and economic landscape. The city is growing rapidly, with maquiladora production, cross-border transport, drug trafficking, and an urban infrastructure unable to keep pace with demographic growth. In a later press exchange, Klaus Haas identifies the Uribe family’s extensive cargo-trucking business, whose vehicles move maquiladora goods across the border frequently, alongside the family’s property and business holdings. Sonora TV’s regional presence belongs to this world of connected flows, but the story does not suggest that information alone can overcome the economic, policing, and jurisdictional structures that leave women vulnerable.

Sonora TV therefore functions both as a means of exposure and as a measure of exposure’s insufficiency. Florita names the city and accuses its police on camera, but the first broadcast scarcely reaches Santa Teresa; a later appearance ends in a medical emergency; and the killings continue to circulate through public attention in waves. The station makes a voice audible without guaranteeing that it will be widely received, institutionally acted upon, or remembered.