2666 is known mostly for Part 4 because it’s so long and repetitive in its disturbingness. It’s 280 pages, largely about the missing women found brutally murdered. There are 100+ accounts of bodies turning up with clinical, cold descriptions of the horrible end they faced. Femicide is as important a subject as it is hard to talk and read about, and nobody can accuse Bolaño of running away from the worst of it.

My friend is friends with the wonderful contemporary novelist, Noor Naga, and he told me of an interesting remark she made that completely makes sense to me, along the lines of, “no woman has ever recommended I read 2666.” No doubt she had in mind Part 4, about the Crimes.

With this in mind, and because almost everybody who writes about 2666 focuses on this aspect of the novel, I’d like to look at the other parts of Part 4 that I think play a key role in the novel. I wish I wrote this piece right after reading it, so it was fresher, but I made some notes mid-read. Excuse me if this piece is a little loose, but it’s a big, hard, complex section of the novel!

One track I didn’t notice before was the story about the narco ratting out the other smaller narco rival to the cops to take out a competitor. That happens again.

After women’s bodies are found in an area of town where upper class people own property, there’s a meeting between the mayor, the powerful narco Pedro Rengifo, and the police chief, Pedro Negrete. Head honchos. Later, Haas will say that “it’s all being taken care of.”

Then, Haas holds a press conference where he accuses people named the Uribe brothers, who own a trucking company, of being the serial killers, 30 murders, in and just outside Santa Teresa. Haas is never exonnerated, despite what he claims, but after his semi-secret phone calls in jail, and his connection to a powerful narco on the inside, he appears to be trying to associate the narco’s rivals with the murderers.

Just like neither narco bosses are innocent but one gives up the other to advance in their crimes, maybe the Uribe brothers are genuinely killers. They could be.

You never get an answer about who did it, you just get partial, foggy glimpses of the interworkings of a complex machine that is responsible for the deaths and for obscuring the guilty. It’s not a whodunit novel. It’s a what-dunnit.

There’s also a snuff film industry and drug trade that Haas seems to be involved in using computer dealing as a cover, and it goes to the top. The narcos are in on it. When Haas and his men kill and rape the caciques gang in jail in extremely brutal fashion, the cops watch. They supervise it. The cops didn’t merely turn a blind eye; “one had a camera [page 522]. Was that turned into a film?

Haas is protected by the narco Enrique Hernandzez, who is in cahoots with the cops and the politicians. That there’s corruption throughout the system isn’t exactly a new or novel observation, but if you read this part of Part 4 carefully, you’ll find an impressive level of care and details Bolaño invested in both showing and not showing the particulars. Everyone knows there’s mega corruption, but pinning the particulars down is trickier.

Kessler is followed by Negrete, probably, not the cops he’s touring with, as they fluff him up whereas Pedro Negrete doesn’t meet him at all, despite being police chief. This is for me a clue about who is on what side of the rival factions.

It’s amazing and revealing comparing the way Kessler and even the critics travel versus the poor migrants. Kessler has a mariachi band greet him and the mayor personally stamps his passport after waving immigration away. The Critics fly to this city and that for a conference or to have sex with each other and eat fancy dinners and drink cocktails. The migrants struggle to make it to Santa Teresa to find work, and many end up dead in a particularly nightmarish hell.

This comparison is silently implied, but once you think about it, it’s hard not to notice. It’s not just the contrast between luxury and squalor. The point is that the people travelling in luxury don’t really experience a border at all, whereas the poor working-class very much do.

The story of the guy on TV who tried to get into the US 345 times, once every four days, for the span of a year. What did he do for money? Because polleros are not cheap. He paid for the first few, then they gave him a discount, then they brought him as a talisman, as other migrants were hopeful that if anyone got caught by border guards, it would be him, not them.

One dark point. Yolanda Palacio talks so Sergio in El Rey del Taco [page 568] about the bright side, but in trying to frame things positively, she only reinforces the connection between the dark side of global capitalism and the murders: “Do you know which city Mexican city has the lowest female unemployment?” Of course, it’s Santa Teresa.

The desert and the sea are somehow the same thing in this novel. Recall Baudelaire’s epigraph, “An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.” The image of the border crossings being desert islands and cities being ships is apt. This contrasts with Archimboldi’s love of coral and being underwater. Even the night sky comes up again and again. National borders are not the only borders in this novel that can be either concrete or porous. People’s dreams merge. Mirrors are a recurring motif in every section.

The police are misogynistic in their spare time and in their professional duty. The way these bear on each other is key. But even Sergio, the credible and dogged reporter who writes admirably about the murders, had an epiphany when, during a post-coital conversation with a sex worker, he realizes that the missing women aren’t sex workers; they work at the maquilladoras. Misogyny is in the air and nobody is immune, even the people who like to think they mean well, and do in fact work to achieve something positive.

Azucena Exquivel Plata, a very powerful Mexican congresswoman, has a friend Kelly who goes missing after working at what turn out to be high-class orgies with the narco Campuzano’s men, a narco banker (who maybe or maybe wasn’t there) and other high ups…one of the competing factions. For a second she feels bad that only her personal connection to all the murders is what pushed her to do something about them, but then she’s over it, saying that’s life. “No snuff films were made there” the private investigator on Kelly’s case says. This negation only opens up more questions. I’m not sure to what extent snuff films drive the seedy underworld of Santa Teresa. The drug trade and business in general seem very wrapped up in politics and are surely more lucrative?

But there’s a lot of talk about films, on different levels. Kessler, the big shot US detective, advises on Hollywood films. The congresswoman mentions films. Charlie Cruz (in Part 3) owns a video store and his house has the living room with no windows where they watch a porno. Movies come up all the time in Part 4. Is it because this is an entertainment society where media shapes public perception of what police do? Maybe it influences the police themselves? Or is the snuff film industry itself a driving force in things? Films are spoken of innocently, in artistic terms. In the way that global capitalism rests on poor laborers working in extremely precarious, dangerous conditions (Santa Teresa’s maquiladoras) to create products everyday people consume in North America or Europe, there’s a connection between the horrorific implications film have in Santa Teresa and the cache films have elsewhere. Ultimately, we all participate in the system and are complicit whether we mean to be or not.

Note, the bodies turn up in a maquilladora where laborers make TVs.

Part 4 is disturbing, and for extremely understandable reasons that aspect is usually what receives people’s focus. The novel revolves around the murders, panning in and out from different perspectives. If you read Part 4 carefully and can stomach description after description of corpses killed in gruesome ways, it’s the closest zoom Bolaño provides, the closest you get to seeing heart of darkness. But you never do and there’s no closure. It wouldn’t be solved by locking up one or two people, that’s the real point.

In the second last part of Part 4, the congresswoman is determined to get to the bottom of things. “I’ll be with you always, though you can’t see me, helping you every step of the way,” she says to Sergio. If Santa Teresa’s murders are shrouded, so to is a notable effort to solve them.

Part 1 opens on Christmas, Pelletier’s birthday, and Part 4 closes on Christmas. I think that’s a dark joke, if anything. The fictional town is called “Santa Teresa.” I have no idea if I’m reading too much into this, or if Bolaño is trying to subtly bury a little lightheartedness or maybe some balance into the darkest section of a very dark book, which ends with laugher coming from streets like black holes, “the only beacon that kept residents and strangers from getting lost.”