Sergio Gonzalez

Sergio Gonzalez is a thirty-five-year-old arts writer for La Razon in Mexico City when a recent divorce leaves him in need of money. Sent to Santa Teresa in July 1993 to report on the Penitent, he finds a story that official accounts and his assignment do not contain: women are being killed, and the crimes remain largely unsolved. He gathers material on the city and its institutions, then returns to Mexico City and files the Penitent story alone. Years later, when the imprisoned Klaus Haas challenges the assumption that the killings have been solved, Gonzalez is again connected to the reporting—but refuses to go back. His limited, interrupted involvement traces the distance between a story’s urgency and the attention the press is willing or able to give it.

An arts writer sent north

Gonzalez is not a crime reporter. At thirty-five, recently divorced, he writes philosophy reviews that attract little readership, along with occasional pieces on art and music. He has worked for La Razon for four years and had been managing financially before the divorce. With few commissions available in his own section, he presses editors elsewhere in the paper for extra work. The Sunday magazine editor offers him the Penitent assignment, partly because the editor respects him and partly because the trip might give him a few days away from Mexico City. Gonzalez accepts for the money, though he would not ordinarily have chosen the subject.

In July 1993, he flies to Hermosillo and continues by bus to Santa Teresa. He takes a room at the inexpensive El Oasis hotel in the city center. The change of scene initially lifts his spirits: the skies seem bright, and the people he encounters strike him as friendly. He regards Santa Teresa as hardworking and as having little unemployment, an impression he will soon have to set beside the more difficult accounts he hears about factory work, migration, and poverty.

Reporting the Penitent

Gonzalez visits the offices of El Heraldo del Norte and La Voz de Sonora, speaks with local reporters covering the Penitent, and visits the desecrated churches in a single day, accompanied by a taxi driver who waits outside. He talks with priests at San Tadeo and Santa Catalina. The latter advises him to look more closely at the city: in the priest’s view, the church desecrator turned killer is not Santa Teresa’s worst scourge. The police provide Gonzalez with a sketch of the suspect, and he arranges to speak with Juan de Dios Martinez, the inspector in charge of the case.

The city administration also helps furnish his report. The mayor invites Gonzalez to lunch, where municipal officials fill the conversation with gossip and jokes. When Gonzalez tries to interview the police chief, a young staff member instead gives him a folder of information about the Penitent. This young man, Zamudio, spends the evening with him. They go to a club and buy drinks for women who, from their clothing, appear to be factory workers. One woman says she likes dancing more than anything in the world; the answer strikes Gonzalez as illuminating and sad, though he cannot explain why. She is unimpressed that he is a reporter writing about the Penitent and has never read La Razon. The encounter offers a glimpse of the gap between Gonzalez’s professional identity and the lives of the women around him, without giving him a clear explanation for it.

The next morning, Gonzalez wakes alone with the uneasy sense that he has seen or heard something forbidden, or at least awkward. At the police office, he waits among three judicial police inspectors. Two play dice with beans, and some of the beans jump on the table. The inspectors continue their game, naming throws in words he does not understand; when he asks, one confirms that they are jumping beans. The episode sets official routine beside something inexplicable to the visiting journalist, while the officers treat it as ordinary.

When Juan de Dios Martinez arrives, he speaks with Gonzalez privately about the Penitent. The inspector asks that the information be kept off the record and describes the suspect as suffering from sacraphobia, a fear and hatred of sacred objects. In his account, the Penitent attacks images of saints out of rage rather than with a premeditated intention to kill; the deaths, he says, are accidental. The explanation is an attributed police theory, not a conclusion Gonzalez independently establishes. Its neatness is also unsettled by the priest’s warning that Santa Teresa faces worse dangers than the desecrations.

The story behind the assignment

The second account of the city reaches Gonzalez through a priest who visits Colonia Lomas del Toro to say Mass and clean the church. The church at Santa Catalina remains unrepaired for a time, while other desecrated churches are restored. The priest explains that money is needed for many things, implying that replacing damaged sacred objects is not always the most urgent concern. In their conversations, he tells Gonzalez about crimes against women that remain mostly unsolved.

The priest’s account links the killings’ setting to the movement of people seeking work or passage north. He describes Central American migrants, Mexicans arriving daily for jobs in the maquiladoras, and people hoping to cross the border. He speaks of human trafficking by polleros and coyotes and of factory wages low enough to be exploitative, yet still coveted by people arriving from Querétaro, Zacatecas, and Oaxaca. Gonzalez listens as the priest describes journeys made alone or with families, with people reaching the border before allowing themselves to rest, cry, pray, drink, or dance. The city is not just the backdrop to the Penitent case: its labor market, migration, and border crossings form part of the surrounding account of vulnerability and violence.

Gonzalez’s encounter with the priest also briefly turns toward his own life. Asked what else he does in Mexico City, he says he has just divorced and reads a lot, especially philosophy. The priest names liberation theology and detective novels among his own reading. This exchange does not resolve the crimes or provide Gonzalez with a method for investigating them, but it places the arts writer and the priest in a conversation about how people interpret the world around them.

Leaving Santa Teresa—and the story

The next morning, Gonzalez takes the bus to Hermosillo and, after a four-hour wait, flies back to Mexico City. Two days later he files his story on the Penitent for the Sunday magazine and promptly forgets the business. His report is the story he was sent to write, not an account of the killings that the priest has described. The separation matters: Gonzalez has encountered information that enlarges the apparent subject of his assignment, yet his departure closes the episode without his turning that discovery into a sustained investigation.

The novel later places his work in the context of the news cycle. At breakfast near the Arena del Norte, Chucho Flores tells Oscar Fate that the numbers of murdered women rise into the news periodically; public conversation swells and then fades, after which people return to work. Flores compares the killings to a brutal strike. His account gives a broader social shape to the intermittent attention Gonzalez’s story embodies: the issue is not simply whether violence is reported, but how long it remains in view.

A second chance declined

In a later reporting episode, Gonzalez is in Mexico City when his newspaper receives a new opportunity to cover the Santa Teresa murders. In January 1996, Klaus Haas convenes a press conference from prison and asks how murders can continue while the supposed killer is behind bars. He points to matching knots in the ropes used in the deaths of Michelle Requejo and Estrella Ruiz Sandoval and notes that Estrella was the only murdered woman, he says, to have had direct contact with him, through her interest in computers. La Razon sends a novice crime reporter, who reads the case file on the flight to Hermosillo; the file contains Gonzalez’s earlier stories.

Before the assignment goes to the novice, the crime editor walks five floors to the arts section and asks Gonzalez if he wants to take it. Gonzalez looks at him without answering and finally shakes his head. This refusal is his last clearly established decision concerning Santa Teresa in the evidence presented here. The episode contrasts his earlier encounter with the story’s setting and witnesses against his later choice not to return. It also shows how the paper’s coverage proceeds through assignments, files, and replacement reporters, while the unresolved murders continue beyond the brief periods when they attract attention.

Narrative role

Gonzalez’s thread connects a narrowly assigned crime report to the novel’s larger account of killings that resist both resolution and sustained public attention. He observes local journalism, receives an official explanation from an investigator, and hears from a priest about unsolved crimes and the conditions of life around the border. These sources do not add up to a complete account, and Gonzalez’s eventual departure leaves the distance between what he encounters and what he publishes intact.

His later refusal keeps that distance from becoming a conventional investigative arc. Rather than following the killings toward an answer, the narrative returns to him when the paper has another chance to report and shows him declining it. Gonzalez’s position as an arts writer, his dependence on paid assignments, the editor’s control over his initial brief, and the later dispatch of a novice reporter make his appearances a measure of journalistic selection. The murders briefly become a story, recede, and return to the newsroom without thereby becoming resolved.