In January 1993, children playing in a vacant lot in Colonia Las Flores find the body of thirteen-year-old Esperanza Gómez Saldaña — sexually violated and strangled. She is the first documented victim in Bolaño's central section, which catalogs over a hundred such murders in the border city of Santa Teresa (modeled on Ciudad Juárez), presenting them in relentless bureaucratic detail until the accumulation itself becomes the horror.