José Refugio de las Heras

José Refugio de las Heras, the mayor of Santa Teresa, appears at the junction of the city’s public image and its unresolved violence. He presents an outside investigator’s visit as professional training rather than an admission of police failure, yet when Congresswoman Azucena Esquivel Plata comes seeking Kelly Rivera Parker, she finds that the local authorities offer little help and do not connect the disappearance to the killings of women. His appearances reveal how official confidence can coexist with institutional silence.

Office and the city’s public image

Santa Teresa is described as a city expanding in every direction: its poorer neighborhoods, industrial parks, and maquiladoras press against one another, while its infrastructure struggles to keep pace with demographic growth. Chucho Flores calls it a place with factories, low unemployment, a cocaine cartel, incoming workers and immigrants, and both wealth and poverty—but without time. That portrait supplies the setting for de las Heras’s mayoralty: the city’s growth is visible, while its capacity to respond to violence remains uncertain.

When the authorities invite former FBI agent Albert Kessler to Santa Teresa, reporters ask whether the decision tacitly acknowledges that Mexican police have failed. De las Heras denies that interpretation. He describes Kessler’s visit as a fifteen-hour training course for selected officers from Sonora, explaining that Santa Teresa was chosen both for its industrial importance and for its record of serial killings. His answer turns a crisis into a training opportunity, presenting the visit as preparation to stop a growing problem rather than a public admission that the existing response has failed.

The welcome for Kessler

The city’s reception of Kessler is staged with conspicuous ceremony. After he flies through Tucson and reaches Santa Teresa on a small plane, the mayor welcomes him at the airport. A mariachi band plays a song that Kessler thinks may mention his name. De las Heras takes over the passport-stamping from the customs officer and pauses with the stamp raised and a broad smile, allowing photographers time to capture the moment. The sequence makes the mayor an active manager of the visitor’s public arrival, not merely a host in the background.

A convoy then carries the party to city hall, where Kessler gives a press conference before leaving for the hotel’s desert suite. Reporters ask about the case file, the killings, and the investigator’s experience; Kessler declines to comment on the central questions. The mayor’s carefully orchestrated welcome therefore yields a public image of cooperation, but the evidence does not show that the ceremony itself resolves any case or establishes what the police will do next.

Esquivel Plata’s request

De las Heras’s other consequential encounter is with Congresswoman Azucena Esquivel Plata, who travels to Santa Teresa to find her missing friend Kelly Rivera Parker. Esquivel Plata recalls that the mayor dropped everything when told she was waiting and received her in his office. He arranged breakfast and had his secretary record the details she gave: Kelly’s full name, the day she disappeared, why she was in Santa Teresa, her age, and her profession. He then ordered the secretary to bring Ortiz Rebolledo, the head of the state judicial police, directly to city hall.

The prompt response initially resembles effective action, but Esquivel Plata’s subsequent account complicates that impression. During her two-night stay at the Hotel Mexico, she says, she could not get anywhere with the authorities. Officials told her that no one had reported Kelly missing, although she knew Kelly’s partner had done so. The name Salazar Crespo did not come up; neither did the killings of women, already public knowledge, or any connection between those cases and Kelly’s disappearance. Esquivel Plata’s account does not establish what de las Heras personally knew, but it shows that the information-gathering at his office did not lead, in her experience, to a transparent or useful investigation.

Performance and institutional silence

After failing to secure answers, Esquivel Plata calls local reporters and holds a press conference at her hotel, where she tells Kelly’s story and vows to keep pursuing the truth. National outlets later pick up the story. She also calls political allies for support. Her decision to go public contrasts with the official response she describes: the mayor’s office collects information, but the missing woman’s case remains obscured by contradictory claims and the omission of related violence.

De las Heras is not shown solving either the disappearances or the killings, and the narrative does not provide a private explanation for his conduct. His role is instead defined by the distance between public presentation and practical accountability. At Kessler’s arrival, he carefully stages civic cooperation; in Esquivel Plata’s account, the local machinery fails to furnish even a consistent account of whether Kelly was reported missing. Through this contrast, the mayor becomes part of the novel’s broader portrait of a city where official visibility does not guarantee that the people most in need of attention will be found.