On the trail of the pink crosses in the crime part of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 novel

Abstract

The murder of 119 women and the sequence of events that are narrated by them are the plot of “The Part about the Crimes”, a chapter from the novel, “2666” written by the author Robert Bolaño in 2004. Among the heartbreaking, frightening and violent events described by a narrator in third-person, “The part about the crimes” (2004) retells the tragic story of a multiple killing of female assembly plant workers in the city of Juárez. The women, who were between fifteen and twenty-five, were also raped and tortured. Behind the heart-breaking narrative and the violent details of the crimes, the underlying reason for the story is a memorial to these women who suffered the horror of displacement, poverty, inequality, a lack of opportunities and a lack of social recognition.