Roberto Bolano Read Free

detail is like nothing in any of Bolaño’s previous works—or in any of the newspaper accounts he could have read. His descriptions of the murder investigations, and of the incidents surrounding the trial of the chief suspect, are equally precise and uncanny.
    How did Bolaño become so intimate with the details of these crimes, and the procedures of the local police, when he lived an ocean away? His other investigative novels were written after the fresh blood of history had dried; even then, Bolaño had always drawn from firsthand knowledge of the events or from that of his friends. Yet at the time he was writing “The Part About the Crimes,” information about the murders in Juárez was quite restricted. To pull off this kind of hyperrealism, he must have had the help of someone on the inside, someone whose interest in autopsy was as relentless as his own.
THE PART ABOUT THE JOURNALIST
    In the summer of 1995, the year Bolaño wrote to Carla Rippey, the bodies of several young women were discovered semi-nude and strangled just south of Juárez, near the local airport. That September the city offered a $1,000 reward for information about The Predator. A month later, police arrested Abdel Latif Sharif Sharif, an Arab-American with a historyof sexual aggression, and charged him with the five murders, plus a few others committed in September. But two months later, while Sharif Sharif awaited trial in prison, fresh corpses began to appear. The police maintained that Sharif Sharif, a chemist, had directed these murders from his cell, paying $1,200 for each woman killed. His accomplices, they said, were eight teenage boys they arrested in a sweep of nightclubs. They were called The Rebels.
    Almost 1,000 miles away, in Mexico City, this news fascinated a reporter named Sergio González Rodríguez. A novelist and arts journalist, González Rodríguez had launched his career during the 1980s by doing reviews for Carlos Monsiváis, a leading cultural critic and a pioneer of the nueva crónica, or New Journalism, style in Mexico. By the time the newspaper
Reforma
came calling in 1993, González Rodríguez was well known as a centrist critic who wasn’t afraid of riling the government: he’d been fired from the magazine
Nexos
for publishing an article in
Reforma
that questioned the ethics of intellectuals who allied themselves with then-President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who’d been elected in 1988 amid widespread allegations of voter fraud. This independent temperament made González Rodríguez a good match for
Reforma—
the paper had a history of serious investigative reporting—and he was hired to edit one of the paper’sweekend cultural supplements, “El Ángel.” (These days González Rodríguez still serves as the section’s editorial consultant. He also writes three regular columns for the paper.)
    The news from Juárez reminded González Rodríguez of the movie
Silence of the Lambs
, which he’d seen a few years earlier. Could it be, he wondered, that Ciudad Juárez held a real Hannibal Lecter? Answering that question wasn’t part of his regular beat, but as he explained to me in a series of interviews, he’d always been interested in literature about violence. His favorite books include Truman Capote’s
In Cold Blood
, Norman Mailer’s
The Executioner’s Song
and Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s
Politics and Crime
. He already had plans to travel to the state of Chihuahua to teach a seminar. It wasn’t hard to persuade
Reforma
to pay for a jumper flight from there to Juárez so he could report on a press conference that the chief suspect planned to hold, in prison, on April 19, 1996.
    That day González Rodríguez watched a tall, middle-aged man with green eyes talk to some thirty reporters. Sharif Sharif barely spoke Spanish—he’d lived in Mexico for less than a year—so he gave his presentation in English while a bilingual reporter translated. What he said sounded like a soap opera. According to Sharif