Lomas Taurinas is a squatters’ settlement in a ravine on the eastern edge of Tijuana, near the airport. Its steep, eroded ground and improvised housing embody the precarious conditions of the neighborhood; in March 1994, the same terrain became the setting for a campaign rally where presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio was shot. The place joins the material realities of poverty to a political turning point, while its crowded, constricted layout helps explain how the attack unfolded.

Setting and Living Conditions

The settlement consists of shacks and huts tucked into a ravine among the bare, muddy mountains east of Tijuana. Erosion makes the ground unstable: residents choke on dust in dry conditions and slip in mud washed down the hills, which can carry shacks with it. Water once ran through the neighborhood in rivulets beneath homes, so that some residents built their shacks over the channels. Although Lomas Taurinas had recently received piped water and electricity, much of the ground remained an open sewer and a slow-moving garbage dump.

Those improvements had been granted as a reward for the neighborhood’s loyalty to the Institutional Revolutionary Party. The detail places basic services within a system of political exchange: a visible benefit reached residents, but the surrounding landscape remained marked by neglect. The settlement is not merely a backdrop to national politics; its living conditions and its relationship to party power are part of the scene’s meaning.

The Campaign Rally

Colosio spoke from the bed of a pickup truck parked at the bottom of a natural amphitheater in the ravine. A large, restless crowd had gathered, and the narrow route into the neighborhood had already made movement difficult: people had surrounded his red Chevy Blazer as it slowly made its way up the single street. Antonio Ramos, watching from the slope with his Special Tactical Group stationed at different points around the bowl-shaped gathering place, worried that the crowd might similarly obstruct Colosio’s departure.

The setting limited what security personnel could see and hear. As the candidate moved in and out of the crowd, his guards could barely keep him in view; music from speakers mounted on a truck further masked the sound of the gunshot. The amphitheater concentrated the audience around Colosio, but its density and uneven sightlines also left the security detail struggling to control access to him.

Assassination and Significance

Mario Aburto, a twenty-three-year-old mechanic, stood among the crowd in Lomas Taurinas. He pushed through the presidential bodyguards, seized Colosio’s right shoulder, pressed a .38 pistol to the right side of his head, and fired. Ramos barely saw the attack before fighting his way down toward the commotion; people in the crowd grabbed Aburto and began beating him.

The assassination makes Lomas Taurinas a pivotal location in the novel’s political narrative. A presidential campaign appearance placed an elite security detail inside a poor, crowded settlement whose geography and inadequate infrastructure shaped the event’s immediate conditions. The contrast is sharp but concrete: Colosio stood in the bed of a pickup at the bottom of the ravine, surrounded by guards, yet the crowd and the terrain made him reachable. The neighborhood’s significance lies both in what happened there and in the way its physical and political circumstances frame the violence.