The social legibility of death

The social legibility of death describes the unequal process by which deaths become recognizable as matters of public concern. In 2666, Professor Kessler connects this process to the language used to describe violence, the social status of its victims, and the institutions that record their bodies. Santa Teresa’s killings expose the limits of such recognition: deaths can be counted and investigated while the women themselves remain unknown, and the attention briefly given to the murders can melt away as ordinary life resumes.

Words, fear, and public recognition

Kessler argues that in earlier centuries death was filtered through words. News accounts could make crime seem rare, as if a single murder were enough to unsettle an entire country, while terrible crimes and serial killings continued beyond the public frame. Language, in his account, served as a form of avoidance: like a frightened child closing his eyes, society could use words to contain what it feared rather than reveal the violence plainly. The inherited archetypes of cruelty and madness remained, but their repetition did not necessarily move readers; testimony could strike them as futile or senseless.

His historical comparisons show that the social meaning of a death depends not only on its number or severity, but on whether the victim belongs to the society doing the counting. At least twenty percent of the people transported for sale on seventeenth-century slave ships died, yet their deaths did not produce headlines or calls to punish a captain. By contrast, when a Virginia plantation owner killed his neighbor and wife, the murders frightened local society and could persist in legend. During the Paris Commune of 1871, thousands were killed without attracting the attention that a knife sharpener’s murder of his wife and elderly mother received across France and Europe. The distinction, Kessler says, is that some victims were considered outside society, whereas the deaths of people recognized as part of it could be written about—that is, made legible.

Santa Teresa: counting and disappearance

The killings in Santa Teresa give this distinction a present and unresolved form. The first victim on the list was thirteen-year-old Esperanza Gomez Saldana, found in January 1993 in a vacant lot in Colonia Las Flores. Two women were kneeling nearby in prayer; when a policeman asked whether they knew the girl, one said that she was not from the neighborhood. Her identity was eventually established, and her death was examined by police and a medical examiner. Yet the narrative immediately qualifies the apparent beginning of the record: other girls and women may have died in 1992, never entered the list, remained unfound, or been buried in unmarked graves in the desert. A list can establish a first name without proving that the violence began there.

The distance between documentation and recognition recurs in official handling of the dead. After the police chief examined Esperanza’s body, the medical examiner performed an autopsy and recorded the cause and circumstances of death. In another case, three executives from Multizone-West waited near a dump where a woman had been found; one handed money to a policeman, who placed it in his uniform pocket. An autopsy recorded that the woman had been killed, but she remained unidentified. Institutional attention could therefore produce a report without restoring a name or securing equal regard: the body was examined, while the surrounding social order continued to treat its presence as something to remove.

The dumps and other marginal spaces sharpen the contrast between official categories and lives at the edge of them. At El Chile, where Emilia Mena Mena’s body was found, the local population of people living among the trash was small and precarious, fluctuating between three and twenty. The account describes them as sick and short-lived, and notes that removing clothing from a body there was like skinning it. Elsewhere, an unidentified girl found at the city dump was eventually sent to the University of Santa Teresa medical school for students to use. Such details do not simply mark places where bodies appear: they show how poverty and abandonment can turn a person first into an unrecognized victim and then into an object handled by institutions.

News cycles and the city’s ordinary life

The idea also concerns the changing visibility of violence in public discourse. Chucho Flores tells Oscar Fate that whenever the number of killings rises, the news returns and people talk; the story grows like a snowball, then melts, and people go back to work. His account makes the killings’ recurrence inseparable from the recurrence of attention—and from the attention’s disappearance. The deaths are not hidden once and for all; instead, they become briefly conspicuous, then are absorbed again into daily routine.

That routine belongs to a city described as both booming and unable to keep pace with its growth. Chucho lists factories and maquiladoras, low unemployment, a cocaine cartel, workers arriving from other cities, Central American immigrants, and infrastructure unable to support the expanding population. Santa Teresa has money and poverty, violence and a desire for peace, but, in his judgment, no time. Against this background, the killings can be treated as one more recurring crisis in an overburdened city rather than as a break that permanently alters how it functions.

Fate tries to make the killings legible to an audience beyond Santa Teresa. He tells his editor that the story involves the possibility that one or two people committed a vast number of murders, as well as drug trafficking, the border, police corruption, and the city’s unchecked growth. He asks for another week to gather material and promises to file quickly. The editor refuses the proposed story and tells him to finish his boxing assignment and return to New York. Fate’s attempt to redirect the magazine’s attention thus encounters a gatekeeping decision: a journalist may recognize the importance of the deaths, but that recognition does not ensure that an institution will publish them.

Limits of explanation and visibility

Kessler offers Fate three propositions about Santa Teresa: everyone living there is outside society, the crimes bear different signatures, and the city appears to be advancing even as its inhabitants might be better off crossing the desert and leaving. Together, these observations resist an easy account in which a single criminal explanation would make the killings intelligible. The city can be seen as prosperous and expanding while also being represented as excluded from the protections and recognition that define social belonging. Its residents’ condition parallels, without erasing the differences among them, the broader exclusion of victims whose deaths do not command sustained concern.

The gap between an account of violence and an adequate explanation remains open. In January 1996, Klaus Haas, imprisoned as the suspected killer, calls reporters to ask how murders can continue while the alleged murderer is behind bars. He points to matching knots in the ropes used on Michelle Requejo and Estrella Ruiz Sandoval and notes that Estrella had been in direct contact with him because of her interest in computers. His press conference challenges the public simplification of the case, but it does not resolve who is responsible for the killings. The same month, a women’s organization in Santa Teresa discusses the degrading treatment families of the dead have received and prepares letters to public officials; the letters go unanswered, though the local branch grows from three people to twenty. Visibility can prompt questions and collective action without compelling a response from authority.

The concept therefore holds together several different kinds of evidence without pretending that they amount to justice. A name may enter a list; an autopsy may establish a cause of death; a journalist may pitch a story; an organization may address officials; and a suspect may contest the case against him. None of these acts alone ensures that victims become fully legible to society. In the world of 2666, the most unsettling measure of recognition is not whether the violence can be described, but whether the dead remain present in public memory after the news cycle fades and the city goes back to work.