While Anita has grown tremendously more mature and knowledgeable about the situation in her country, this is a situation that she doesn’t quite understand, which suggests just how scary and dangerous it is. The few facts she
does glean makes this even more worrying; presumably, her father and Tío Toni would only want suicide pills if they thought that being captured by the SIM would be a fate worse than death. Anita is searching her father’s pockets for pills in part because she doesn’t want him to die, and in part because she wants to protect herself; she has come to understand that this situation is incredibly dangerous, and even at twelve, she is thinking about ways to avoid being tortured and murdered.