Rosario Tijeras

Jorge Franco

4 ideas

1. Rosario Tijeras dying, told by Antonio

   Rosario, a young woman from Medellín's hillside comunas, is shot point-blank while being kissed. Antonio, a well-off boy from the city's affluent side, waits at the clinic and narrates how she became a sicaria. She earned the name 'Tijeras' by mutilating a man who had sexually assaulted her with scissors. She later drew Antonio and his friend Emilio, who became her lover, into her world, while Antonio loved her with a devotion she returned only once and never fully.

2. Confusing the pain of love and death

   The novel opens with Rosario, shot while being kissed, mistaking the pain of love for the pain of death. In a saturated culture of violence, intimacy and killing use the same gestures and the same bodies, so desire is felt as danger and danger as desire. The attraction Rosario exerts cannot be separated from the lethality she carries.

3. Cross-class romance as mutual use

   For her, they are access to money and spaces otherwise closed to her. Each side consumes the other as an experience, which is why the crossing produces fascination but never belonging. The city's segregation survives inside the love affair itself.

4. Devout piety coexisting with contract killing

   The sicarios pray to the Virgin, wear scapulars, and seek blessing for the tools of their trade, including their bullets. Religion does not restrain the killing. It works as a private insurance and moral bookkeeping that makes the killing bearable, and it keeps faith in the mother, loyalty to kin, and hope of protection intact alongside murder for hire.

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