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This happened in 1993. January 1993. From then on, the killings of
women began to be counted. But it's likely there had been other deaths before.
The name of the first victim was Esperanza Gomez Saldana and she was thirteen.
Maybe for the sake of convenience, maybe because she was the first to be killed
in 1993, she heads the list. Although surely there were other girls and women
who died in 1992. Other girls and women who didn't make it onto the list or
were never found, who were
b
uried in unmarked graves in the desert or whose ashes were
scattered in the middle of the night, when not even the person scattering them
knew where he was, what place he had come to.

The identification of Esperanza Gomez Saldana was
relatively easy. First the body was brought to one of the three Santa Teresa
police stations, where it was seen by a judge and examined by more policemen
and photographed. After a while, as an ambulance waited outside the station,
Pedro Negrete, the police chief, arrived, followed by a pair of deputies, and
he proceeded to examine her again. When he had finished he met with the judge
and three policemen who were waiting for him in an office and asked what
conclusion they had reached. She was strangled, said the judge, it's clear as
day. The policemen just nodded. Do we know who she is? asked the chief. They all
said no. All right, we'll find out, said Pedro Negrete, and he left with the
judge. One of his deputies stayed behind at the station and asked to see the
officers who had found the dead girl. They've gone back out on patrol, he was
told. Well, get them back here, shitheads, he said. Then the body was taken to
the morgue at the city hospital, where the medical examiner conducted an
autopsy. According to the autopsy, Esperanza Gomez Saldana had been strangled
to death. There was bruising on her chin and around her left eye. Severe
bruising on her legs and rib cage. She had been vaginally and anally raped,
probably more than once, since both orifices exhibited tears and abrasions,
from which she had bled profusely. At two in the morning the examiner concluded
the autopsy and left. A black orderly, who had moved north from
Veracruz
years ago, put
the body away in a freezer.

Five days later, before the end of January, Luisa Celina
Vazquez was strangled. She was sixteen years old, sturdily built, fair-skinned,
and five months pregnant. The man she lived with and a friend of his were
smalltime thieves who stole from stores and appliance warehouses. The police
were alerted by a call from neighbors in the couple's building, located on
Avenida Ruben Dario, in Colonia Mancera. After breaking down the door, they
found Luisa Celina strangled with a television cord. That night, her lover,
Marcos Sepulveda, and his partner, Ezequiel Romero, were arrested. Roth were
locked up at Precinct #2 and subjected to an interrogation that lasted all
night, conducted by the police chief's right-hand man, Officer Epifanio
Galindo, with optimal results, since before the sun came up Romero confessed to
having maintained intimate relations with the deceased behind the back of his
friend and partner. Upon learning that she was pregnant, Luisa Celina had
decided to put an end to these relations, which Romero refused to accept,
because he thought that he, not Marcos Sepulveda, was the father of the unborn
child. After a few months, when Luisa Celina wouldn't change her mind, he
decided in a fit of insanity to kill her, which he finally did one night when
Sepulveda was away. Two days later, Sepulveda was released, and Romero, rather
than being sent to prison, remained locked up at Precinct #2, where the
interrogations continued, their object this time not to clear up any lingering
questions regarding the murder of Luisa Celina but to incriminate Romero in the
murder of Esperanza Gomez Saldana, whose body had by now been identified.
Despite what the police expected, deceived as they were by the speed with which
they had obtained the first confession, Romero stood firm and refused to
implicate himself in the earlier crime.

Midway through February, in an alley in the center of the
city, some garbagemen found another dead woman. She was about thirty and
dressed in a black skirt and low-cut white blouse. She had been stabbed to
death, although contusions from multiple blows were visible about her face and
abdomen. In her purse was a ticket for the nine a.m. bus to
Tucson
, a bus she would never catch. Also
found were a lipstick, powder, eyeliner, Kleenex, a half-empty pack of
cigarettes, and a package of condoms. There was no passport or appointment book
or anything that might identify her. Nor was she carrying a lighter or matches.

In March, the female reporter for the radio station El
Heraldo del Norte, sister company of the newspaper
El Heraldo del Norte,
left
the broadcast studio at ten with a male reporter and the sound engineer. They
headed to the Italian restaurant Piazza Navona, where they ordered three slices
of pizza and three small bottles of
California
wine. The male reporter was the first to leave. The female reporter, Isabel
Urrea, and the sound e
e
ngineer, Francisco Santamarfa, decided to stay and talk a
little longer. They discussed work matters, scheduling, and programs, and then
they began to talk about a friend who had left the station, gotten married, and
gone to live with her husband in a town near Hermosillo, the name of which they
couldn't recall but which they were sure was near the ocean and which for six
months out of the year, according to this friend, was the closest thing to
paradise. They both left the restaurant. The sound engineer didn't have a car,
so Isabel Urrea offered to give him a ride home. No need, said the engineer,
his house was nearby and anyway he would rather walk. As the engineer set off
down the street, Isabel walked toward the place where she had left her car. As
she got out her keys to unlock it, a shadowy figure appeared on the sidewalk
and fired at her three times. The keys fell. A passerby some twenty feet away
dropped to the ground. Isabel tried to get up but she could only lean her head
against the front tire. She felt no pain. The shadowy figure approached and
shot her in the forehead.

The murder of Isabel Urrea, covered the first three days by
her radio station and paper, was explained as a frustrated robbery, the work of
a lunatic or drug addict who probably meant to steal her car. The theory also
circulated that the perpetrator might be a Guatemalan or Salvadorean veteran of
the wars in Central America, someone desperate to get the money to move on to
the United States. There was no autopsy, in deference to the family, and the
ballistic analysis, which was never made public, was later lost for good
somewhere in transit between the courts of Santa Teresa and
Hermosillo
.

A month later, a knife sharpener making his way along Calle El
Arroyo between Colonia Ciudad Nueva and Colonia Morelos saw a woman clinging
drunkenly to a wooden post. A black Peregrino with tinted windows passed by. At
the other end of the street, the knife sharpener spotted an ice cream vendor
approaching, covered in flies. The two men converged on the wooden post, but
the woman had slipped or lost the strength to hold on. Her face, half hidden by
her forearm, was a pulpy mass of red and purple flesh. The knife sharpener said
they had to call an ambulance. The ice cream vendor stared at the woman and
said she
l
ooked as
if she'd gone fifteen rounds with El Torito Ramirez. The knife sharpener
realized the ice cream vendor wasn't going to budge and he said to watch his
cart, he would be right back. After he crossed the dirt road he turned around
to check that the ice cream vendor was obeying, and he saw all the flies that
had been circling the vendor settle around the woman's battered head. A few
women were watching from the windows across the street. Somebody needs to call
an ambulance, said the knife sharpener. That woman is dying. After a while an
ambulance came from the hospital and the medics wanted to know who would pay
for the ride. The knife sharpener explained that he and the ice cream vendor
had found the woman lying on the ground. I know, said the medic, but what I
care about now is finding out who will take responsibility for her. How can I
take responsibility for a person when I don't even know her name? asked the
knife sharpener. Well, somebody has to, said the medic. Is there something
wrong with your ears, dumbfuck? asked the knife sharpener, pulling a giant
carving knife out of a drawer in his cart. Hey now, hey now, hey now, said the
medic. Go on, get her in the ambulance, said the knife sharpener. The other
medic, who had knelt to examine the fallen woman, swatting away the flies, said
there was no point in anyone losing his shit, the woman was already dead. The
knife sharpener's eyes narrowed until they looked like two lines drawn with
charcoal. Goddamn motherfucking asshole, it's your fault, he said, and he
started after the medic. The other medic tried to intervene, but when he saw
the knife in the knife sharpener's hand, he decided to lock himself in the
ambulance and call the police. For a while the knife sharpener chased the medic
until his fury, exasperation, and bloodlust abated, or until he got tired. And
then he stopped, took his cart, and headed off down Calle El Arroyo until the
onlookers who had gathered around the ambulance lost sight of him.

The woman's name was Isabel Cansino, though she went by
Elizabeth
, and she was a
prostitute. The blows she'd received had destroyed her spleen. The police
blamed the crime on one or several dissatisfied customers. She lived in Colonia
San Damian, quite a bit farther south than she'd been found, and she wasn't
known to have a steady boyfriend, although a neighbor woman talked about
someone called Ivan who came by often, and who couldn't be located on
subsequent visits. An attempt
w
as also made to discover the whereabouts of the knife
sharpener, whose name was Nicanor, according to the statements of residents of
Colonia Ciudad Nueva and Colonia Morelos, where he came around approximately
once a week or once every two weeks, but all efforts to find him were in vain.
Either he had changed jobs or he'd moved from the west of Santa Teresa to the
south or east or he'd left the city altogether. In any case, he was never seen
again.

The next month, in May, a dead woman was found in a dump between
Colonia Las Flores and the General Sepulveda industrial park. In the complex
stood the buildings of four maquiladoras where household appliances were
assembled. The electric towers that supplied power to the maquiladoras were new
and painted silver. Next to them, amid some low hills, were the roofs of shacks
that had been built a little before the arrival of the maquiladoras, stretching
all the way to the train tracks and across, along the edge of Colonia La
Preciada. In the plaza there were six trees, one at each corner and two in the
middle, so dusty they looked yellow. At one end of the plaza was the stop for
the buses that brought workers from different neighborhoods of Santa Teresa.
Then it was a long walk along dirt roads to the gates where the guards checked
the workers' passes, after which they were allowed into their various
workplaces. Only one of the maquiladoras had a cafeteria. At the others the
workers ate next to their machines or in small groups in a corner, talking and
laughing until the siren sounded that signaled the end of lunch. Most were
women. In the dump where the dead woman was found, the trash of the slum
dwellers piled up along with the waste of the maquiladoras. The call informing
the authorities of the discovery of the dead woman came from the manager of one
of the plants, Multizone-West,
 
a subsidiary
of a multinational that manufactured TVs. The policemen who
 
came
 
to get
 
her found
 
three
 
executives
 
from
 
the maquiladora waiting for them by the dump.
Two were Mexican and the other was American. One of the Mexicans said they
hoped the body would be removed as soon as possible. One of the policemen asked
where the body was, while his partner called an ambulance. The three executives
accompanied the policeman into the dump. The four of them held their noses, but
when the American stopped holding his nose the Mexicans followed his example.
The dead woman had dark skin and
s
traight black hair past her shoulders. She was wearing a black
sweatshirt and shorts. The four men stood looking at her. The American crouched
down and moved the hair from her neck with a pen. It would be better if the
gringo didn't touch her, said the policeman. I'm not touching her, said the
American in Spanish, I just want to see her neck. The two Mexican executives
crouched down and peered at the marks on the dead woman's neck. Then they got
up and looked at their watches. The ambulance is taking a long time, said one
of them. It'll be here in a second, said the policeman. Well, said one of the
executives, you'll take care of everything, won't you? The policeman said yes,
of course, and tucked the money the other man handed him into the pocket of his
regulation pants. The dead woman spent that night in a refrigerated compartment
in the Santa Teresa hospital and the next day one of the medical examiner's
assistants performed the autopsy. She had been strangled. She had been raped.
Vaginally and anally, noted the medical examiner's assistant. And she was five
months pregnant.

The first dead woman of May was never identified, so it was
assumed she was a migrant from some central or southern state who had stopped
in Santa Teresa on her way to the
United States
. No one was traveling
with her, no one had reported her missing. She was approximately thirty-five
years old and she was pregnant. Maybe she was going to the United States to
join her husband or her lover, the father of the child she was expecting, some
poor fuck who lived there illegally and maybe never knew he had gotten this
woman pregnant or that she, when she found out, would come looking for him. But
this first death wasn't the only one. Three days later, Guadalupe Rojas (her
identity clear from the start) was killed. She was twenty-six, a resident of
Calle Jazmin, one of the streets parallel to Avenida Carranza, in Colonia
Carranza, and employed at the File-Sis maquiladora, recently built on the road
to
Nogales
,
some five miles from Santa Teresa. As it happened, Guadalupe Rojas didn't die
on her way to work, which might have made sense, since the area around the
maquiladora was deserted and dangerous, best crossed in a car and not by bus
and then on foot since the factory was at least a mile from the nearest bus
stop, but at the door to her building on Calle Jazmin. The cause of death was
three gunshot wounds, two of them pronounced fatal. The killer turned out to be
her boyfriend, who tried to flee that very night and was caught by the train
tracks, not far from a nightspot called Los Zancudos where he had gotten drunk
earlier. It was the owner of the bar, a former city police officer, who called
the police. Once the suspect had been questioned, it was revealed that the
motive of the crime was jealousy, warranted or not, and after an appearance
before the judge and upon the agreement of all present, he was sent without
further delay to the Santa Teresa jail to await transfer or trial. The last
dead woman of May was found on the slopes of Cerro Estrella, the hills that
lend their name to the Colonia that surrounds them unevenly, as if nothing
could easily grow or expand there. Only the eastern side of the hills faced
mostly open country. That was where they found her. According to the medical
examiner, she had been stabbed to death. There was unmistakable evidence of
rape. She must have been twenty-five or twenty-six. Her skin was fair and her
hair light colored. She was wearing jeans, a blue shirt, and Nike sneakers. She
wasn't carrying any identifying documents. Whoever killed her had taken the
trouble to dress her, because neither her jeans nor her shirt were torn. There
were no indications of anal rape. The only mark on her face was a faint bruise
on her upper jaw, near her right ear. In the days after the discovery,
El
Heraldo del Norte
as well as
La Tribuna de Santa Teresa
and
La
Voz de Sonora,
the three city papers, published pictures of the unknown
victim of Cerro Estrella, but no one came forward to identify her. On the
fourth day after her death, the Santa Teresa police chief, Pedro Negrete, went
in person to Cerro Estrella, not accompanied by anyone, even Epifanio Galindo,
and examined the place where the dead woman had been found. Then he left the
low slopes and began to climb to the top of the Cerro. Among the volcanic rocks
were supermarket bags full of trash. He remembered that his son, who was
studying in
Phoenix
,
had once told him that plastic bags took hundreds, maybe thousands of years to
disintegrate. Not these, he thought, noting the rapid pace of decomposition
here. At the top some children went running and vanished down the hill, toward
Colonia Estrella. It began to get dark. To the west he saw houses with
zinc
 
and cardboard roofs,
 
the
 
streets winding through an
 
anarchic sprawl. To the east he saw the highway that led to the
mountains and the desert, the lights of the trucks, the first stars, real
stars, stars that crept in with the night from the far side of the mountains.
To the north he didn't see anything, just a vast monotonous plain, as if life
ended beyond Santa Teresa, despite what he hoped and believed. Then he heard
d
ogs, the sounds coming closer and closer
until he saw them. They were probably starving and wild, like the children he'd
caught a glimpse of when he arrived. He pulled his gun out of his shoulder
holster. He counted five dogs. He took off the safety and shot. Instead of
leaping in the air, the dog collapsed, and the force of the shot sent it
skidding through the dust, curled in a ball. The other four dogs ran off. Pedro
Negrete watched them go. Two had their tails between their legs and ran in a
crouch. Of the other two, one ran stiff tailed, and the fourth, for some
unknown reason, wagged its tail, as if it had been given a treat. He went over
to the dead dog and touched it with his foot. The bullet had gone into its
head. Without glancing behind him he walked on down the hill, to the place
where the body of the victim had been found. There he stopped and lit a
cigarette. A Ducados, unfiltered. Then he continued on to his car. From here,
he thought, everything looked different.