San Fernando: última parada
Marcela Turati

NONFICTION | 2023 | 424 pages

In a small town on Mexico's northern border, passengers disappear from the local bus station. Most are young men northbound in search of a better life. Pulled from arriving buses, they are abducted, murdered and buried in secret graves. When mass burials were uncovered in 2011, the government identified the remains of 193 victims, only to conceal the truth once again. The massacres may have been attributed to the Zetas cartel, but the networks of complicity that allowed it remained untouched.

In this powerful work of narrative nonfiction, Marcela Turati reconstructs the massacres of San Fernando through the voices of survivors, relatives, witnesses, officials, and investigators. Guiding readers through a landscape shaped by organized crime, state neglect, and systemic impunity, she reveals how violence became routine and how entire communities were left for dead.

Both a devastating chronicle and a remarkable act of witness, this book exposes the machinery of disappearance at the heart of Mexico's so-called war on drugs, while illuminating the courage of families determined to recover their loved ones and demand justice. San Fernando emerges not as an isolated tragedy, but as the clearest expression of a system that allows horror to persist in plain sight.

RIGHTS: spanish AGUILAR