The Santa Teresa femicides, from 1993·1994 onward

The Santa Teresa femicides, from 1993/1994 onward, are not a neatly bounded series with a settled victim count or a conclusive account of responsibility. They become the novel’s enduring measure of the city: deaths accumulate across years while official investigations, news coverage, and public attention repeatedly fragment or recede. The period begins with the January 1993 discovery of a thirteen-year-old girl, but the narrative insists that earlier victims may have gone unrecorded, leaving the beginning—and the total—uncertain.

A beginning that cannot be fixed

The killings are counted from January 1993, when the body of thirteen-year-old Esperanza Gomez Saldana was found in a vacant lot in Colonia Las Flores. Two women were kneeling nearby in prayer; they told the responding officers that they did not know the girl and that she was not from the neighborhood. The setting offered no clear witness or explanation, and the first victim’s place at the head of the list reflects the beginning of a count, not proof that the violence began with her.

The account explicitly leaves open the possibility that girls and women had died in 1992 or earlier without entering the record. Some may never have been found; others may have been buried in unmarked desert graves or disposed of without anyone knowing the location. The period’s chronology is therefore founded on the limits of discovery and documentation. What can be dated is the start of a public count, not necessarily the start of the killings.

That uncertainty persists years later. A boy tells Jean-Claude Pelletier and Manuel Espinoza that more than two hundred women have died, and Espinoza recalls their difficulty believing him. The boy places the deaths from 1993 or 1994 to the present, speculating that the total might be 250 or 300, while acknowledging that no one will ever know. These figures are reported estimates, not a definitive tally; their widening range makes the missing record part of the period’s meaning.

Recurrent cases and unresolved responsibility

Individual investigations repeatedly produce partial findings without resolving the broader pattern. After the murder of radio reporter Isabel Urrea, the case was publicly framed as a failed robbery, an act by a lunatic or drug addict, or possibly an attack by a Central American veteran seeking money to travel north. No autopsy was conducted at the family’s request, and the ballistic analysis was later lost while passing between the courts of Santa Teresa and Hermosillo. The official explanations multiplied, but the evidence that might have tested them did not remain available.

The investigation into Emilia Mena Mena’s killing likewise narrowed around a suspect who had disappeared before police arrived. Officers questioned his father and brothers, pursued an address in Ciudad Guzman, and found no trace of him. The case remained open and was soon forgotten. Five days after Emilia’s body was found, another unidentified woman was discovered on the grounds beside Morelos Preparatory School. Her name was never learned; the medical examiner could not settle the exact time or cause of death. The shift from a named case to an unidentified victim shows how the record could preserve a death while failing to restore the person’s identity.

The uncertainty was not limited to individual case files. In January 1995, workers found a woman’s skeleton shallowly buried on land belonging to the Hijos de Morelos farming cooperative. The medical examiner could identify the remains as female and determine that the death was a homicide, but could not establish how or precisely when she had died. The police statement then floated a scenario in which a driver from elsewhere might have killed a hitchhiker and left her there. That possibility displaced responsibility outward without resolving the case.

Institutions, priorities, and public attention

The persistence of the killings stands in direct contrast to the pressure placed on investigations. Juan de Dios Martinez was ordered away from the stalled Penitent case and assigned a series of armed robberies. He was told the earlier inquiry was not formally closed, but that limited investigative resources had to go to cases judged more urgent. Officers who had been watching the city’s churches around the clock were redirected to work considered more beneficial to public security. The decision turns institutional scarcity into part of the chronology: an investigation can remain nominally active while the attention needed to pursue it is reassigned.

Official access to information also remained restricted and provisional. When the American consul and Santa Teresa’s police chief discussed the disappearance of a Huntsville sheriff, the chief stressed that tourists passed through the city in large numbers. Permission was nevertheless granted for the sheriff’s assistant to review photographs of unidentified bodies found from November 1994 onward; none of the bodies could be identified as the missing man. The episode shows the limits of what accumulated records could establish, even when an outsider with a specific missing-person inquiry was allowed to consult them.

In January 1996, Klaus Haas challenged the assumption that imprisonment had solved the killings by asking how women could still be murdered while the alleged killer was behind bars. At a press conference that month, the Santa Teresa branch of Women of Sonora for Democracy and Peace described the degrading treatment of victims’ families and displayed letters it intended to send to the governor and the attorney general. The letters went unanswered. Although the branch grew from three members to twenty activists and supporters, the absence of women’s bodies in the city that month did not amount to a resolution; it marked a temporary pause within an ongoing crisis.

The cycle of attention and forgetting

The period is also shaped by the rhythm of public attention. Chucho Flores describes the killings as becoming news whenever the numbers rise: reporters and residents talk about them, the story grows, and then attention melts away and people return to work. His account does not make the public indifferent at every moment; it describes a recurring cycle in which renewed notice fails to become lasting attention. The workday resumes while the underlying violence remains.

Journalism encounters its own limits within that cycle. In Santa Teresa, Manuel Espinoza finds Jean-Claude Pelletier reading the local papers with a Spanish-French dictionary and saying he wants to learn what is happening in the city. The previous night, the two scholars had heard the reported total from a boy who had read a book by Benno von Archimboldi translated by Pelletier. In another strand, Oscar Fate’s editor rejects his proposed story and tells him to finish his sports assignment and return immediately; the editor cites either lack of interest or lack of budget. The contrast is between the local catastrophe’s immense scale and the practical limits on which stories receive time, money, and publication.

The period consequently remains open in more than a chronological sense. Its number of victims cannot be settled, its first deaths may precede the official count, and its investigations leave identities and responsibility unresolved. The repeated movement from discovery to provisional explanation, from press attention to silence, and from one urgent assignment to another gives the femicides their cumulative force: each case is particular, yet none can be understood apart from the continuing failure to make the whole pattern visible or to bring it to an end.