Working Girls

. . .and as he was talking the whore yawned, not because she wasn't interested in what he was saying but because she was tired, which irritated Sergio and made him say, in exasperation, that in Santa Teresa they were killing whores, so why not show a little professional solidarity, to which the whore replied that he was wrong, in the story as he had told it the women dying were factory workers, not whores. Workers, workers, she said. And then Sergio apologized, and, as if a lightbulb had gone on over his head, he glimpsed an aspect of the situation that until now he'd overlooked.

Page 466.

It would be nice if Sergio were to share the insight. We must noodle it out for ourselves. I would not trust Sergio's insights anyway.

Therein lies the problem. Sergio's insight may simply be that the victims are predominately factory workers and not prostitutes. The guy is not a helluva lot of use to us, the readers.

Elvira Campos

Sometimes Elvira Campos thought it would be best to leave Mexico. Or kill herself before she turned fifty-five. Maybe fifty-six?

Page 513.

Interesting. I don't want to leave Mexico either. But in my case it is not quite this serious a matter. Killing one's self in late childhood? She should up that to age seventy-five at least.

It is also interesting that we are offered this angst with nary a hint as to what lies behind it.

Harry Magaña

vigilante: a member of a volunteer committee organized to suppress and punish crime summarily (as when the processes of law are viewed as inadequate); broadly: a self-appointed doer of justice.

Harry Magaña is clearly a vigilante in the broad sense of the word. His role raises interesting questions about the complete breakdown of the state apparatus for dispensing justice as portrayed in the novel. We grant a monopoly on violence to the state in connection with the social contract on the presumption that the state will effectively employ that violence to provide security for the citizens. Bad cops, for example, constitute a breach of this social contract. In Santa Teresa we witness a breakdown of the entire social contract. It should therefore be no surprise that vigilantism then comes into play to fill the breach.

We need to discuss this more, but in the meantime the observations in Daryl's entry at Infinite Zombies entitled “One More Po” and the comments appended make interesting reading. I continue to ponder that entry and those comments.



http://infinitezombies.wordpress.com/2010/03/19/one-more-po/

The Narcos: A Dead End

The reporter answered that Santa Teresa was a center of the drug trade and most likely nothing happened there that wasn't related to the phenomenon one way or the other.

And what exactly does that tell us? Not much. At page 463 we are told explicitly for the first time that Pedro Rengifo is a narcotraficante. We certainly suspected this at the time that Lalo commenced his employment as a bodyguard for Rengifo's wife, but we were not told. Still, Rengifo is not a particularly malevolent character. We have a sense that he is simply a businessman in a dangerous business.

The narcotics traffic does not get a lot of play in the novel. It is simply something that is there in the background. In that regard it is worthwhile to remember that the situation in the Mexican border states in 1993-95 was a different situation by several magnitudes than it is today after Felipe Calderon started the war with the drug lords with the support of the United States as he promised in his 2006 campaign.

The sentence quoted at the outset is the only indication anywhere in the novel—that I recall—that suggests even a tenuous connection between the narcotics traffic and the murders.

Pages 353-404: Lalo I

How can we not be favorably disposed toward Olegario Cura Expósito, a sixteen-year-old kid raised in poverty in Villaviciosa who displays integrity and no small amount of courage? And how does he make it out of poverty? Through his skill and courage amid violence. La locura. Lunacy.

Through him we are introduced to the two scumbags who are also bodyguards for Pedro Rengifo's wife, one from the state of Jalisco and the other from Chihuahua—Ciudad Juárez in the state of Chihuahua, to be exact. I do not recall any other mention of Ciudad Juárez to this point in the book.

Santa Teresa is in the state of Sonora.


Lalo's Desert Eagle .50 Magnum manufactured in Isreal. Magazine holds seven rounds in the .50 cal. Action Express version.

Latest U.S. State Department Travel Alert, 22 February 2010.