Juan Parada

Juan Parada is an archbishop whose authority rests not only on his office but on his closeness to the people he serves. He shares their concerns and everyday life, advocates for the poor and Indigenous communities, and tries to interrupt the violence around him. The earthquake exposes a fracture in his faith, while his eventual death reveals the persistence of his compassion: even as he is dying, he offers forgiveness to Sean Callan.

Identity and Pastoral Practice

Parada is an unusually popular archbishop, known for going among the people rather than remaining apart from them. He visits towns, joins in their meals, and shares their concerns, thoughts, and laughter. His popularity is visible in a Thursday cathedral Mass crowded with worshippers because he is celebrating it. The narration acknowledges that he enjoys the attention, but also makes clear that it has been earned through sustained personal engagement. The joke that townspeople make about needing a larger chair for his visits turns his appetite into an affectionate sign of how fully he participates in communal life.

His religious outlook likewise resists distance from ordinary experience. Parada values the Mexican form of Christianity for its union of Indigenous traditions, love of nature, and emotionally steadfast faith in Jesus. In his view, this is not a spirituality that rejects the natural world in favor of abstraction; it embraces earthly life alongside the sacred. The reflection is sufficiently persuasive to him that, during Mass, he considers incorporating it into a sermon. This moment presents his preaching as something formed through thought and lived experience, not simply the repetition of doctrine.

Earthquake and the Strain on Faith

The earthquake interrupts a Mass as Parada is preparing to give communion. In the aftermath, he attends to the dead and to townspeople searching the ruins for missing loved ones. Twenty-five bodies lie in makeshift shrouds outside the damaged cathedral, while the search continues among the fallen stone. Parada performs the religious duty expected of him, speaking the Latin prayers for the dead, but the catastrophe has unsettled his relationship with God. He privately understands the rupture as a fault line between himself and the divine.

He does not make that crisis public. The bereaved are looking to him for hope and for the assurance that their loved ones can be entrusted to heaven; he judges that voicing his own doubt would add cruelty to their grief. His silence is not presented as a settled recovery of belief. Instead, it is a choice to protect the people who rely on him, even while he cannot reconcile what has happened with faith. The earthquake therefore changes the terms of his pastoral role: he continues to serve without pretending that his inner certainty remains intact.

Public Advocacy and Political Conflict

Parada’s work increasingly places him in political danger. He preaches on political questions, organizes labor, and spends more time in Chiapas, where he helps make the church a center for the Indigenous movement. Local landowners are angered by this work. He also opposes the North American Free Trade Agreement, arguing that it will deepen the dispossession of poor and landless people. His religious office thus becomes a platform for confronting the material conditions that affect his congregants, not a refuge from politics.

That stance brings him into conflict with Cardinal Antonucci, the papal nuncio. After Antonucci summons him to Mexico City to answer for what he calls grave pastoral and doctrinal errors in Chiapas, Parada recounts the confrontation to Nora Hayden. Antonucci begins by challenging liberation theology, but Parada rejects the implication that the label resolves the underlying dispute. Their disagreement signals a tension between ecclesiastical scrutiny and Parada’s insistence on acting among politically vulnerable communities. The danger is not only institutional: Nora fears that his public sermons and organizing may get him killed, and observes that his safety, like his health, has become a concern.

When Antonucci later returns to his residence, he finds Parada there, directing activity by telephone and issuing orders amid the unsettled staff. Parada asks for more coffee because the night will be long. The scene shows him taking practical responsibility in a crisis, rather than waiting for authority to arrive from elsewhere. His relationship with Antonucci remains contentious, but Parada can work in the nuncio’s office while continuing to act according to his own urgency.

Personal Loyalties and Attempts at Mediation

Parada’s private relationships are shaped by trust as well as secrecy. Nora and Adán Barrera agree that their relationship must remain hidden from him. Each feels, in a different way, that keeping it from Parada violates a bond: Nora’s longstanding platonic friendship with him and Adán’s former relationship with him. The arrangement makes Parada an important emotional reference point even when he is absent from the scene. He is not simply a cleric connected to their lives; his judgment and friendship matter enough that both keep the relationship from him.

He also becomes a channel through which Adán seeks to address the cartel conflict. Adán comes because Parada asks him to, and because Adán has asked Parada to summon him. He tells his old priest that he wants the violence to stop. Parada answers that stopping it is simple in principle, but Adán insists that the reality is more difficult and asks for help. The exchange neither treats the wish for peace as empty nor suggests that Parada can resolve the violence by authority alone. It establishes him as a mediator whom Adán trusts, while exposing the distance between a moral demand and the power required to carry it out.

That violence has hardened into a forced choice for local dealers: Raúl Barrera presents allegiance to Güero Méndez or the Barreras as mutually exclusive. The cartel rivalry is expressed through the choice between Coke and Pepsi, and those who declare loyalty to one side become targets of the other. Parada is not shown directing this contest, but his efforts to reach Adán take place within a conflict whose coercive logic leaves little room for neutrality. His appeal to stop the violence confronts a system that makes allegiance visible and punishes the opposing choice.

Evidence, Death, and Forgiveness

Parada’s moral standing also makes him a recipient of evidence that others fear to carry. Cerro brings him a briefcase containing papers and tapes, explaining that he has participated in a massive crime and is afraid to die with it on his conscience. He wants to make restitution. Parada examines the materials, does not immediately understand their purpose, and tells Cerro that confession can bring absolution. He then asks why the evidence has been brought to him rather than to the attorney general. His response joins spiritual counsel to practical uncertainty: he offers a route toward repentance, but recognizes that evidence of a crime may require more than private confession.

In the final confrontation, Sean Callan rushes toward Fabián Martínez and shouts a warning that Fabián has mistaken the person in front of him. Parada grabs the rifle and forces its barrel downward, trying to stop the shooting. Fabián regains control and shoots Parada. The episode makes Parada’s intervention an action rather than a sermon: he places himself between a threatened person and the weapon, continuing to resist violence at the point when argument has failed.

As Parada is dying, the narration recalls the ordinary things he still wants: more life, music, Nora’s smile, another meal, prayer, and further work to do. His desire to live does not turn into a final retreat from responsibility; he is still concerned with reaching the dying young man and offering comfort. To Callan, he murmurs that he forgives him and that God forgives him. The words give his death its defining consequence. Parada’s faith has been shaken by catastrophe and tested by political conflict, but at the end he uses it not to condemn or withdraw, but to release another person from guilt. His role in the novel is therefore both civic and spiritual: he repeatedly tries to translate moral belief into aid, mediation, and protection, even when those acts cannot save him.