Faith and science

Faith and science is the unresolved conflict at the center of Don Adán Barrera and Lucía’s efforts to help their daughter: Lucía turns increasingly toward religious devotion, while Adán puts greater hope in doctors and medical research. Neither offers the cure they seek. Their parallel searches make belief a practical, intimate response to suffering, but also expose how little certainty either can provide. Elsewhere, Art Keller’s recognition of his own complicity in Miguel Ángel Barrera’s political design extends the problem beyond medicine: faith in a cause, an institution, or one’s own judgment can persist even when its consequences reveal how badly that trust was misplaced.

A Family’s Search for Help

Don Adán Barrera and Lucía respond differently to the same crisis. Lucía goes to church to pray, offers Masses and benedictions, kneels before the saints, buys milagros outside the cathedral, burns candles, gives money, and makes sacrifices. Her devotion is active and repetitive: she keeps trying forms of appeal rather than accepting that nothing can be done. The practices are not presented as a simple rejection of medicine. Faith and science are described as powers that sometimes cooperate and sometimes conflict in the couple’s attempt to help their daughter.

Adán also goes to church on Sundays, makes offerings, prays, and receives Communion, but these acts are chiefly a gesture toward Lucía. He has stopped expecting help from that direction. His religious routine continues, but its meaning has diminished into outward observance. On regular trips to Culiacán to bring an offering to Güero Méndez, he also stops at the shrine of Santo Jesús Malverde to make a manda. He prays to the Narcosanto, yet places more hope in doctors. His practice thus occupies an uneasy middle ground: religious acts remain part of his life, even as his confidence shifts toward medical expertise.

Numbers, Doctors, and the Limits of Certainty

Adán’s confidence in science is grounded in the habits of his work. He deals with numbers every day, makes important decisions by them, and regards arithmetic and mathematical proof as the most dependable measures of truth. To him, numbers are not merely useful tools; they seem to offer a law that cannot be persuaded or comforted. This conviction makes the prospect of his daughter’s worsening condition especially painful. The numbers, as he reads them, say that she is likely to get worse as she grows older, while Lucía’s prayers appear unanswered.

He responds by placing his hopes in the possibility that someone will discover the right formula, a drug, or a surgical procedure able to succeed where prayer has not. The search spans a wide range of expertise and approaches: pediatric neurologists, neuropsychologists, psychoneurologists, endocrinologists, brain specialists, research chemists, herbal healers, and native healers, alongside people he regards as charlatans or quacks. The effort crosses national borders, reaching specialists in Mexico, Colombia, Costa Rica, England, France, Switzerland, and the United States. Adán’s work involves marketing drugs, while his private hope is that biomedical knowledge might yield a remedy for his child. The contrast gives his pursuit an especially stark shape: the man whose business is drugs searches for medicine capable of changing the prognosis at home.

Yet this broad search does not become a victory for scientific faith. Adán understands the numbers as forecasting decline, and still hopes that research may produce an exception to what they predict. The couple must continue through what feels like a futile marathon, with neither God nor science able to help their daughter. The two systems differ in the kind of trust they ask of the family—Lucía persists in devotional acts, while Adán waits for expertise and a medical breakthrough—but the outcome described does not confirm either as sufficient. The novel holds hope and knowledge together without converting either into a cure.

Belief as Gesture and Persistence

The contrast between Lucía’s devotion and Adán’s skepticism is not a simple opposition between religion and rationality. Adán continues to participate in religious observance, though he experiences it largely as accommodation to his wife. His visits to Santo Jesús Malverde’s shrine, where he makes a manda during trips to Culiacán, coexist with his stronger confidence in doctors. The religious and medical avenues therefore overlap in his behavior even when his private ranking of them is clear.

Lucía’s response, meanwhile, is rendered through a sustained sequence of actions: prayer, offerings, candles, money, and sacrifice. The repetition matters because the family has no decisive answer to its child’s condition. Her rituals give form to continued effort in circumstances where an outcome cannot be secured. Adán’s consultations and search for a medical formula serve a corresponding purpose, but they are shaped by his conviction that evidence and numbers should disclose what is true. The difference lies less in whether either parent acts than in what each can still believe those actions might accomplish.

Complicity, Responsibility, and Broken Trust

The concept also resonates with Art Keller’s retrospective understanding of his part in Operation Condor. He recognizes that Miguel Ángel Barrera used him against rivals while building the Federación, and that the destruction associated with the operation served a larger project Barrera intended. Art had understood himself as fighting a drug network; the later recognition is that his actions helped establish a larger and more powerful one. His sense of betrayal is inseparable from his own participation: he was used, but he also carried out the work and kept silent afterward.

That recognition complicates confidence in a declared purpose. Art rejects the idea that the operation’s consequences were merely unintended; he comes to see them as planned. Later, he identifies his own lies and cover-up, including the moment he sought help to kill Don Adán Barrera, as part of a moral compromise made for revenge. When offered an arrangement, his refusal is rooted in the loss of Ernie Hidalgo and of his trust in his work, his country, and himself. These episodes do not provide a parallel medical plot, but they deepen the concept’s concern with what people rely on when certainty fails. A cause can claim righteousness while serving another design; a system can promise knowledge or order without delivering the result its adherents expect.

The same tension appears in the later operation against Don Adán Barrera. Art and Shag Wallace exploit the monitored communications between Don Adán and his daughter, and numbers ultimately give them the key to the code. Art recognizes the ease with which Lucía was made to betray her husband as perhaps the worst act of his life. Here numerical analysis is effective as an instrument of surveillance, but its success does not amount to moral or spiritual reassurance. Across these strands, faith and science are not interchangeable answers: both are ways of seeking a remedy or certainty, and neither shields the characters from suffering, error, or responsibility.