Ils n’existent pas.

“Ils n’existent pas.” is don Pedro’s response to news that Miguel Páramo has been accused of killing a man. In a brief exchange reported by Fulgor Sedano, the phrase converts ignorance of the victims into a reason to disregard them, revealing the ease with which don Pedro’s authority can make another person’s suffering count for nothing.

The Exchange

Fulgor recounts that a woman had come to complain that Miguel had killed her husband. He offered her fifty hectoliters of maize in an attempt to make the matter go away, then promised that the family would provide compensation in some other way. She accepted neither offer. Fulgor describes her as inconsolable and insists that he recognized the weight of her grief.

Don Pedro first refuses to believe that Miguel could have committed the killing, saying that the blame could be laid on him instead. When he asks who the accusers are and Fulgor replies that he does not know them, don Pedro dismisses them with the words “Ils n’existent pas.” The sentence follows not proof that the accusation is false, but Fulgor’s admission that he cannot identify the people who made it.

Power and Denial

The offered maize places the complaint within the estate’s economy: Fulgor tries to answer a death with grain and a promise of material redress. The woman’s refusal makes clear that this proposed settlement has not resolved her grief. Don Pedro, however, does not address either her loss or the failure of compensation. He makes the accusers’ unfamiliarity to him sufficient grounds for erasing their claim.

The phrase thus marks more than ignorance. Spoken by the estate’s powerful master, it acts as a denial of standing: people outside his recognized circle can be treated as though they do not count. The exchange contrasts Fulgor’s attention to the woman’s grief with don Pedro’s refusal to let that grief place any demand on him.

Miguel and His Father

The remark belongs to a broader pattern in the conversation: don Pedro excuses Miguel by presenting him as too young and too weak to kill, even as Fulgor warns that the young man is violent and has been accused of murder. Don Pedro offers to take responsibility himself, but this apparent acceptance of blame does not lead to an investigation or an answer to the bereaved woman. His final dismissal instead leaves the accusation without consequence in the exchange.

“Ils n’existent pas” therefore condenses the protection don Pedro gives his son. Miguel’s conduct is treated as less real than the authority that shields him, while the people harmed by it are removed from consideration. The phrase’s bluntness makes that imbalance unmistakable: what don Pedro does not know, he can declare nonexistent.