The secret of the world is hidden in these killings

The phrase “The secret of the world is hidden in these killings” joins a remembered appeal to listen to women with the expanding record of women murdered in and around Santa Teresa. Its force lies in the contrast between the claim that the killings disclose something fundamental and the procedures that render each victim a partial, uncertain entry in a list.

A remembered warning

On the road toward Tucson, Oscar Fate recalls a saying from his youth: women’s fears should not be ignored. He cannot determine whether the words came from his mother or from Miss Holly, a deceased neighbor. That uncertain attribution matters: the warning survives, but its source is already blurred. Fate then remembers Guadalupe Roncal’s claim that no one pays attention to the killings and that the world’s secret is hidden in them. He wonders whether Guadalupe said it, or whether Rosa did. Even the phrase’s ownership shifts, while its demand—to attend to women’s experience—remains.

How victims become entries

The phrase’s ominous reach is grounded in the novel’s accumulation of cases, where naming and counting offer only a precarious form of recognition. In January 1993, children found thirteen-year-old Esperanza Gomez Saldana in a vacant lot in Colonia Las Flores, beside the ruins of an abandoned dairy. Two women were kneeling nearby in prayer; they told the police they had never seen the girl and that she was not from the neighborhood. The narration identifies her as the first victim counted in the 1993 sequence, while acknowledging that other girls and women may have died earlier, in 1992, without appearing on any list or being found at all. The list thus begins not with certainty, but with a boundary drawn around what institutions have managed to record.

Esperanza’s identity was established relatively quickly, but the official process could describe her death more readily than restore her life. She was taken first to a police station, examined by a judge and officers, and then transferred to the city hospital morgue. The autopsy established strangulation and documented extensive evidence of assault; the body was placed in a freezer by an orderly who had moved north from Veracruz. These procedures made the death legible as a case, yet the precision of the report stands beside the absence of any account of who Esperanza was beyond her name and age. The phrase’s promised disclosure is therefore not a solved mystery: the record exposes both the violence and the narrowness of what the record can tell.

That gap widens in later discoveries. In a field near a school, a janitor expecting to find a dead dog instead found a woman whose name was never learned. The medical examiner estimated her age at twenty-three to twenty-five and described the probable cause of death, but could not settle whether a skull fracture had also been decisive. The police eventually removed her body; no identification followed. The scene leaves a person present as a body and absent as a named individual, a stark counterpoint to the confident arithmetic by which killings are counted.

The first discovery of 1995 makes the uncertainty explicit. Farmworkers who uncovered a shallowly buried skeleton thought it belonged to a small man; the medical examiner determined that it was a woman’s, but could not establish how she had been killed or give a definitive date of death. More exact dating would require sending the bones to the Institute of Forensic Anatomy in Hermosillo or to Mexico City. The police instead issued a statement that deflected responsibility by proposing that an unknown driver might have killed a hitchhiker elsewhere and buried her there. What is presented as an explanation remains conjecture, and the official account turns an unresolved local death into a hypothetical crime committed by someone passing through.

Recurrence and erased scenes

The cases continue to frustrate both identification and the idea that violence can be confined to a single, knowable crime scene. On October 7, a teenage baseball group discovered an unidentified girl in bushes beside the railroad tracks and baseball fields. She had suffered extensive violence, yet none of the women reported missing in Santa Teresa matched the description; even an apparent distinguishing feature, one leg shorter than the other, failed to establish who she was. At the site, Epifanio and Lalo Cura found a scene they described as wiped clean. The phrase about a hidden secret acquires a grim double meaning here: the murders compel attention, but the evidence needed to explain them is absent, and the victim remains unnamed.

The meaning of the phrase

The phrase does not promise that the murders can be decoded into a single solution. Its force comes from the repeated distance between what the violence makes visible and what its investigation can establish: a victim may be counted but not named, a cause of death may be judged probable rather than certain, and an explanation may be offered without evidence sufficient to secure it. The secret remains hidden not because the deaths are obscure, but because attention, identification, and accountability repeatedly fail to keep pace with them. Read against Fate’s remembered warning to listen to women, the phrase makes that failure itself part of what the killings disclose.