Adán Barrera and Juan Ocampo Parada

Don Adán Barrera and Juan Ocampo Parada are joined by a friendship that survives in Don Adán’s account even as his actions help bring about Parada’s death. Their relationship reaches its defining contradiction after the killing: Don Adán insists that Parada was his friend and that he loved him, while the circumstances he later recalls place the death within a war he started and a political exchange he helped secure. Faith, grief, and expediency do not cancel one another; they remain entangled in the aftermath.

Friendship and the Killing

The evidence of their bond comes into focus after Parada’s death, when Don Adán speaks with a woman who challenges him over the loss. She invokes Parada as both his priest and his friend, and as her own friend. Don Adán answers that he was not present and was at a christening in Tijuana, describing the death as an accidental crossfire. He adds that the police are blaming Güero Méndez and says Méndez controls them. His account frames the killing as unintended and places him elsewhere, but does not resolve who was responsible; the exchange establishes that Parada’s death has become a point of accusation between people close to him.

Don Adán’s later admission makes the grief more complicated, not less. When the woman says she loved Parada, Don Adán says that he did too; the narration confirms that he is telling the truth. This recognition gives the relationship emotional weight without making his conduct innocent. He can sincerely mourn the priest and still be implicated in the violence surrounding his death. The story holds those facts together rather than treating affection as proof that Don Adán could not have contributed to the danger.

A Death Drawn into the War

Parada’s killing also changes the position of the Barrera family. Fabián Martínez tells Flaco and Dreamer that Don Adán wants them to return to Mexico and surrender. The federales are pressuring the family, raiding safe houses and arresting people, and the pressure is not expected to ease until someone involved in the shooting is found. Fabián proposes that the two men give an account in which the group had gone after Güero Méndez, was ambushed, and Fabián mistook Parada for Méndez and shot him by accident. The proposed confession presents the killing as an unintended outcome of the cartel conflict, while its circumstances reveal how Parada’s death has become a crisis for Don Adán’s organization.

The account offered to the prospective defendants is not identical to the later reflection that closes the year. Don Adán has said he was away at a christening, and Fabián’s proposed version assigns the mistaken shot to Fabián. In his retrospective, however, Don Adán describes Parada as having been mowed down in a crossfire he created while the priest was trying to make peace in the war Don Adán had started. The distinction matters: the proposed explanation is a practical story intended to contain political and law-enforcement pressure, whereas the retrospective places responsibility more broadly on Don Adán’s role in creating the conflict. It does not specify the shot’s mechanics, but it makes the relationship’s rupture inseparable from his own account of the war.

Faith and Political Bargain

Three days before Christmas, Don Adán kneels before Cardinal Antonucci in the cardinal’s private study in Mexico City. Antonucci, the papal nuncio, recites absolution in Latin for Don Adán and Raúl Barrera in connection with their unintentional role in Cardinal Juan Ocampo Parada’s killing. The scene brings the religious dimension of the relationship into public consequence: Parada had been Don Adán’s priest and friend, and the Church’s ritual response addresses the killing as a matter of spiritual responsibility.

That absolution is explicitly limited. Don Adán thinks Antonucci does not absolve him for the murders of El Verde, García Abrego, Luis Donaldo Colosio, and Güero Méndez. In his view, the government has already absolved him in a different sense: the killing of Parada was part of a quid pro quo that allowed Don Adán to kill his own enemies. The contrast separates religious forgiveness from political permission. The ceremony cannot erase the other deaths, while the bargain treats Parada’s killing as a transaction within the larger conflict. Don Adán’s friendship with the priest thus stands beside, rather than outside, the political calculus that follows his death.

Grief and Retrospective Judgment

Afterward, Don Adán considers the year’s dead at a gathering in memory of those who have died. Parada is among the new arrivals in that imagined company, alongside people already remembered and children from Don Adán’s old neighborhood, including two gang members from San Diego. He recalls Parada as having died in the crossfire Don Adán created while the priest attempted to make peace. The reflection connects private loss to the widening cost of the war: the priest is not the only person Don Adán associates with the violence he set in motion.

The relationship’s final significance lies in the gap between Don Adán’s love for Parada and his responsibility for the conditions that killed him. His grief is presented as genuine, but it does not repair the rupture or undo the bargain made in its aftermath. Parada’s effort to make peace, Don Adán’s role in starting the war, the absolution ceremony, and the government’s political exchange remain linked in the account. Their friendship becomes a measure of what Don Adán can recognize emotionally—and of what that recognition cannot prevent.