They’re killing my daughters

“They’re killing my daughters” is Florita Almada’s anguished refrain during a televised trance in which she names Santa Teresa as a place where girls and women are being killed. The phrase gives her vision the force of a public appeal: it expresses collective grief and directly condemns police inaction, while the cases surrounding it show how many victims remain unidentified, uncounted, or inadequately investigated.

The televised accusation

Florita’s first appearance on television begins with an account of a desert, an oasis, and a northern city where girls are killed. As she enters a trance, she repeats the vision and identifies the city as Santa Teresa. She cries, “They’re killing my daughters,” then insists that the police do nothing and calls for the state governor to be informed. The outburst breaks beyond the television program’s ordinary format: the host, Reinaldo, tries to stop her, but she continues before collapsing from her chair. When she rises, she asks what has happened and apologizes to the camera.

The phrase’s possessive “my” makes the dead neither distant strangers nor isolated case numbers. Florita speaks as if the murdered girls and women belong to a shared familial community, turning a private-sounding bond into a claim on public attention. Her words are not a report identifying a perpetrator; they are an insistence that the violence be acknowledged and that those responsible not go unpunished.

From trance to repeated public testimony

Florita later explains that visions of the crimes trouble her sleep and that she sees scenes of the murdered women in dreams. She refuses to make the interview about her supposed miracles, describing her work instead as the product of reading and observing plants, and redirects attention to the women and girls found dead in Santa Teresa’s neighborhoods and outskirts. Repeating the city’s name, she makes the ongoing killings—not her personal reputation—the subject of her testimony.

The phrase’s recurrence changes its force. In the trance, it erupts as a cry; in Florita’s later account, it belongs to an effort to speak repeatedly about the killings despite fear, sleeplessness, and public indifference. Her testimony does not resolve the cases. It gives voice to the demand that the violence be heard.

The evidence the refrain gathers

The narrative places Florita’s words beside specific discoveries that expose the distance between a victim’s death and her recognition. In January 1993, children find the body of thirteen-year-old Esperanza Gomez Saldana in a vacant lot in Colonia Las Flores. Two women kneel nearby in prayer, but say they have never seen her before and that she is not from the neighborhood. The police initially do not know who she is; the account says her name heads the list of killings counted from that January, while acknowledging that other girls and women may have died earlier without being found or recorded.

Other discoveries deepen that uncertainty. A woman found in a field in 1993 is never identified; the medical examiner can only estimate that she was between twenty-three and twenty-five. In January 1995, workers uncover a woman’s skeleton in a field belonging to the Hijos de Morelos farming cooperative. Officials cannot determine how she died or establish when with confidence, and the police publicly suggest that she may have been killed elsewhere and buried there by a passing driver. Such cases show what the refrain encompasses: not only deaths, but gaps in names, timelines, responsibility, and reliable investigation.

Florita’s accusation also resonates with the account of Margarita Lopez Santos, a maquiladora worker who disappears after a night shift. Her route home passes through poorly lit streets and areas lacking basic infrastructure; when her body is eventually discovered, more than forty days have passed since her disappearance. The narrative does not provide a definitive answer to every question raised by such cases. Instead, the phrase gathers the recurring conditions of disappearance, inadequate records, and institutional failure into a demand to listen to those warning that women are in danger.

Narrative significance

The refrain joins an individual voice to a pattern the novel presents through separate victims, places, and investigative records. The procedural language of lists, autopsies, and public statements can identify some facts, but it cannot restore the names missing from the record or explain every death. Florita’s spoken accusation counters that fragmentation without pretending to solve it: its emotional insistence makes the scale of the crisis audible, even as the evidence remains incomplete.