Yolanda Palacio

Yolanda Palacio is the head and, in practice, the sole staff member of Santa Teresa’s Department of Sex Crimes, a government agency barely a year old. Through her exchange with reporter Sergio Gonzalez, she supplies figures that give the city’s sexual violence a scale beyond individual case files, while her account of women’s work reveals how statistical measures of opportunity can coexist with exploitation. Her role is brief but consequential: she names the size of the problem from inside an institution too small to address it adequately.

Office and Background

Palacio is about thirty, fair-skinned and brown-haired, and formal in manner, though the narration notes that her formality sometimes gives way to a visible yearning for happiness and good times. She studied law at the University of Santa Teresa and specialized in penal law at the University of Hermosillo. She discovered that she disliked trials and did not want to become a litigator, so she entered research instead. Her career therefore places her within the legal system without casting her as a courtroom advocate: she works on the scale and patterns of sexual violence rather than presenting herself as a prosecuting lawyer.

The Department of Sex Crimes is described as barely a year old, and Palacio tells Gonzalez that she is its only employee. It once had a secretary, but the secretary grew tired of the job and moved to Ensenada, where she had family. The detail makes the gap between the department’s remit and its resources concrete. Palacio is responsible for describing a citywide crisis from an office that has no remaining administrative support.

Naming the Scale of Violence

Palacio explains that the male-to-female ratio of killings in Mexico is ten to one, whereas in Santa Teresa it is ten to four. The comparison marks Santa Teresa as an extreme case within the national pattern, although it does not by itself explain the causes of the difference. Her figures turn the city’s violence from a series of disconnected reports into a problem with a distinct local scale.

She tells Gonzalez that more than two thousand women in Santa Teresa are victims of sex crimes each year, and that almost half are underage. She estimates that at least as many assaults go unreported, which leads her to suggest a total of roughly four thousand rapes annually, or more than ten a day. She distinguishes these assaults from the killings: some rapes end in murder, she says, but most perpetrators move on. The distinction matters because the department’s numbers describe a much broader field of violence than the murders that dominate public attention.

Palacio’s account is direct about the limits of what can be counted. The reported numbers do not include assaults that never reach the authorities, and her estimate of those cases is an inference rather than a complete official tally. Her figures consequently convey both magnitude and the partial visibility of the problem: the department can quantify only what its methods and available reports bring within reach.

Work, Opportunity, and Constraint

After Gonzalez and Palacio have eaten at El Rey del Taco, she counters the bleakness of their discussion by pointing to Santa Teresa’s relatively low female unemployment rate. When Gonzalez guesses that Santa Teresa must be the Mexican city with the lowest rate, she confirms it. She does not present the statistic as proof that women’s circumstances are good: the available jobs, she says, are poorly paid, involve ridiculous hours, and offer no union protections. They are nevertheless work, and a source of livelihood for women arriving from Oaxaca or Zacatecas.

The exchange holds two facts in tension rather than resolving one with the other. Employment gives many women a means of supporting themselves, but the conditions Palacio describes leave that employment far from secure or equitable. Her qualification prevents the favorable unemployment comparison from becoming a simple success story. It also connects the city’s labor economy to the vulnerability evident in the wider account of violence, without claiming that the jobs themselves explain particular crimes.

Conversation with Sergio Gonzalez

Gonzalez approaches Palacio while trying to report on the killings, though he is unsure why he seeks out a seer, Florita Almada, after speaking with her. His encounter with Palacio gives him a different kind of testimony: not prophecy, but institutional knowledge and a numerical account of sexual violence. He struggles to write his article, and the text places that difficulty beside the scale of the information he is trying to absorb. Palacio, by contrast, does not soften the figures, even as their conversation turns toward food and the possibility that the city is not entirely bad for women.

That turn is deliberately uneasy. After eating, the two look out at the night, smoke, and discuss employment statistics; the ordinary setting does not cancel what they have discussed. Palacio’s practical qualification—that work is available, but often exploitative—keeps the hopeful observation from becoming reassurance. Her brief exchange with Gonzalez thus gives the novel a grounded institutional voice while showing how partial measures of social progress can coexist with pervasive violence and inadequate public capacity.