In 2666, Roberto Bolaño’s last novel, the Chilean author makes a lucid investigation on the feminicides of Ciudad Juarez, through its literary doppelgänger, the city of Santa Teresa. The maquiladoras—an ominous presence under the desert skies of the U.S.-Mexico border—provide many of the victims that local and federal police have found scattered around in vacant lots since the early 1990s. In the novel, as in real life, the violence against local women is such that Bolaño refers to it with a harrowing image:
In February Maria de la Luz Romero died. She was fourteen, and five foot three, with long hair down to her waist, although she planned to cut it someday soon, as she had revealed to one of her sisters. She had just started working at EMSA, one of the oldest maquiladoras in Santa Teresa, which wasn’t in any industrial park but in the middle of Colonia La Preciada, like a melon-colored pyramid, its sacrificial altar hidden behind smokestacks and two enormous hangar doors though which workers and trucks entered.1
As we have seen, there is a clear correlation between the economic problems of maquilas and EPZs and violence towards women, to the extent that it could be said that “NAFTA, as a capitalist approach, has directly created a devaluation of women and an increase in violence.”2 The victims of Ciudad Juarez, and in general the workers of this economic model, are literally being immolated in the pyramid and the sacrificial altar of the most ruthless form of capitalism to date. Most of these crimes remain unsolved. They sky over Santa Teresa, says Bolaño, looks like a carnivorous flower.
The passivity and lack of interest that the authorities have shown for these deaths, and for others like those of Alonzo y Mudiyanselage (8.12), is addressed by Bolaño in a passage that is worth quoting in full:
I’m talking about the nineteenth century, eighteenth century, seventeenth century […] Most human beings existed on the outer fringes of society. In the seventeenth century, for example, at least twenty percent of the merchandise on every slave ship died. By that I mean the dark-skinned people who were being transported for sale, to Virginia, say. And that didn’t get anyone upset or make headlines in the Virginia papers or make anyone go out and call for the ship captain to be hanged. But if a plantation owner went crazy and killed his neighbor and then went galloping back home, dismounted, and promptly killed his wife, two deaths in total, Virginia society spent the next six months in fear, and the legend of the murderer on horseback might linger for generations. Or look at the French. During the Paris Commune of 1871, thousands of people were killed and no one batted an eye. Around the same time a knife sharpener killed his wife and his elderly mother and then he was shot and killed by the police. The story didn’t just make all the French news-papers, it was written up in papers across Europe, and even got a mention in the New York Examiner. How come? The ones killed in the Commune weren’t part of society, the dark-skinned people who died on the ship weren’t part of society, whereas the woman killed in a French provincial capital and the murderer on horseback in Virginia were. What happened to them could be written, you might say, it was legible. That said, words back then were mostly used in the art of avoidance, not of revelation. Maybe they revealed something all the same. I couldn’t tell you.
The answer to the question of Bolaño’s character is this: the legibility of a life is a matter that falls within the field of sovereignty. Words reveal the need for language to hide that the source of sovereignty lies in deciding who lives and who dies and, by extension, which deaths are remembered and which fall into oblivion (8.2)). Of course, the lives (and deaths) that take place extramuros, in the fringes of society, will always be forgotten.
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