Florita Almada

Florita Almada, known on television as La Santa, is a seer whose appearances bring the growing killings of women in Santa Teresa into public view. She neither offers a conventional solution to the crimes nor claims certain knowledge: her descriptions remain partial, imaginative, and difficult to verify. Yet they register the scale and recurrence of the violence at a moment when investigations are stalled, evidence disappears, and the victims themselves are often left unidentified. Her uncertain speech becomes a counterpoint to official certainty and silence.

Public Voice and Advocacy

Florita appears on Reinaldo’s television program alongside activists from Women of Sonora for Democracy and Peace (WSDP). She introduces the women, who use the broadcast to condemn police laxity and corruption, describe the city’s climate of impunity, and call on the state governor to address the rising number of dead women. The program turns an issue often handled as disconnected investigations into a public demand for accountability. Reinaldo’s station head nearly suspends him afterward, while Florita’s presence helps give the activists a platform.

The broadcast reaches people differently. Elvira Campos, director of the Santa Teresa psychiatric hospital, mentions it to Juan de Dios Martinez, who has not seen it. Don Pedro Rengifo watches without discussing it, and Klaus Haas dismisses the activists’ remarks. In prison, however, Haas privately returns to the contradiction at the center of the crisis: he is incarcerated, yet the killings continue. Florita’s public intervention does not settle that contradiction, but it helps make it harder to ignore.

The Seer’s Account

When Sergio Gonzalez decides to seek Florita out, he does not believe in seers. At Channel 7 in Hermosillo, Reinaldo explains that Florita’s friends protect her privacy and calls them a human shield around La Santa. Sergio is eventually brought to her home by Reinaldo and their lawyer, Jose Patricio. There, Florita appears older than Sergio expected. Photographs on the walls include one showing her among a group of men, an image Sergio reads as resembling a sect gathered around a priestess. His description of her is skeptical but unsettled: he wonders whether she is a charlatan, then thinks of the endurance required to face what she describes.

Florita does not present her visions as a dependable supernatural power. She says she sometimes sees or imagines things, as other people do, and that lately her thoughts have repeatedly turned to the killings. She distinguishes the series from what she calls an ordinary murder—not because she believes any murder is truly ordinary, but because the recurring killings leave a different impression. An individual murder, she says, tends to resolve into a liquid image, such as a lake or a well settling after disturbance. The serial killings instead produce a heavy, metallic or mineral image, smoldering and darkening as it burns. Her account translates repetition into a pattern that resists the police tendency to process deaths one case at a time.

Her impressions of the killers are equally limited. Sometimes she sees their faces, but forgets them when she wakes; she describes them as ordinary, though somehow large or swollen, like faces enlarged by corticosteroids. She says she has occasionally heard them speak in a confused Spanish that she can partly understand, but cannot fully make sense of. These details do not identify a suspect or provide evidence that can be tested. Their force lies in the contrast between the apparent ordinariness of the faces and the scale of the violence Florita associates with them.

Encounter with Sergio Gonzalez

Sergio’s meeting with Florita is framed by his uncertainty about what he is doing there. He had been unable to write a draft of his article about the killings. Before the appointment, he has a taxi driver circle the center of Hermosillo; the driver recounts having been attacked seven times in one day, an exchange that further unsettles easy distinctions between danger and routine. At Florita’s house, Sergio asks whether she can see the deaths. Her hesitant answer gives him no clear proof, and he leaves without believing that he will send her the article he promised.

The conversation nevertheless ends on an assertion Florita considers certain. She says that when the figures in her visions speak among themselves, she can tell that their joys and sorrows are immense, even though she cannot understand their words. Sergio asks whether this means they know they are beyond the law. Florita rejects that explanation: their emotional magnitude, as she perceives it, has nothing to do with the law. The exchange preserves the limits of her knowledge while refusing to reduce the killings to a simple account of criminal calculation or legal impunity.

Florita’s relation with Reinaldo extends beyond the broadcast and the interview. After the station’s confrontation with him, he calls her in the early hours of the morning. She says she had been dreaming about him: in the dream, a boy resembling Reinaldo watches a meteor shower on a Sonora beach, with waves reaching his shins. The brief episode shows the intimacy and trust between them, but it does not turn her into an all-knowing interpreter of events; her visions remain personal and ambiguous.

Narrative Role and Limits

Florita’s scenes stand against the procedural record of the murders. The catalog of victims contains autopsies, unclaimed bodies, uncertain dates, missing evidence, and investigations that are shelved or allowed to stall. One unidentified victim is left without a name; another case loses its forensic samples; an investigation into armed robberies takes officers away from a stalled case. Against this record, Florita offers neither a replacement investigation nor a reliable suspect. Her language makes recurrence perceptible where official systems repeatedly fail to connect, preserve, or pursue the evidence.

That contrast also determines the limits of her role. The text does not establish that her visions are objectively true, and Sergio remains skeptical after meeting her. Nor do her images lead directly to an arrest or halt the killings. Her significance instead lies in making the crisis speakable without pretending it has been solved. In a narrative where victims can disappear from public knowledge and institutional attention, Florita’s uncertain testimony insists that the deaths form a burden and a pattern, not merely a succession of isolated files.