3 ideas
In a crime novel, the chase and the investigation give the writer a reason to move characters through many neighborhoods, social classes and everyday transactions. Readers can treat the plot as the vehicle and the streets as the payload: the lasting value is the documented texture of how a city actually works, not the solution to the crime.
When a dictatorship ends without justice, its perpetrators do not vanish. They can reenter everyday life as travelers, clients and neighbors whose pasts are invisible to the people who deal with them.
A tourist economy based on paid intimacy puts local workers into close, unscreened contact with foreigners whose histories they cannot see. That makes the jinetera's client relationship a point where distant political pasts can collide with local lives. It also turns someone at the margins of the economy into a possible witness.