San Fernando. Última Parada: Viaje al crimen autorizado en Tamaulipas (San Fernando, Last Stop: A Journey Through Organized Crime in Tamaulipas) - Incite at Columbia University

Marcela Turati’s San Fernando. Última Parada: Viaje al crimen autorizado en Tamaulipas (San Fernando, Last Stop: A Journey Through Organized Crime in Tamaulipas) was published in October 2023 (available only in Spanish).

This book chronicles her twelve-year investigation into the 2011 mass graves in San Fernando, Tamaulipas, and the disappearance of migrants at the Mexican border. Turati meticulously reconstructs the events and amplifies the voices of victims and their families. Below is the publisher’s official description of the book:

San Fernando. Last Stop could be a horror novel. The scariest part is that it is not.

This book tells the story of a small town with a bus station where passengers disappear. Most of them are young men on their way to the United States, looking for a better future. They travel light in luggage and money. Each dawn, when a bus arrives at the station, they are forced off, taken to ditches, and killed. By mistake, on a whim, just because. Because those murderers have permission. Then they are thrown into clandestine mass graves. When those graves were found in 2011, the government identified the remains of 193 people. And hid them again. The government blamed the Zetas for the killings, but never investigated their complicities.

This book is a choral tale of those massacres. In its pages, the victims, relatives, witnesses, and officials speak. The author leads us, as Dante’s Virgil, through circles of horror and despair, but also of hope and joy when the family gets the body of their missing loved one back, or when they join together against the machinery that makes them disappear. This work takes us to a place occupied by organized crime acting in broad daylight, with authorities covering up for them or looking the other way to accentuate the silence left by impunity.

In this country, as Marcela Turati tells us, State politics are but simulation, concealment. San Fernando is the epicenter of a criminal reasoning that the journalist reveals: helpless people live in a place where authorized crime and the consequences of the “war against the narco” claim hundreds of lives. The mechanisms of impunity that have allowed for the horror to continue to this day are now out in the open.