One year and eighteen days after I was first remanded to prison and then released on bond pending trial (and, in an ironic twist, given around-the-clock police protection as a result of the threats I had received from Succar Kuri and others), my lawyer, Xavier Olea, phoned to wish me a happy 2007 and ring in the good news: A Mexico City judge had just acquitted me on all charges of defamation. The call came as I was traveling home from Holbox Island, in Quintana Roo, where I had spent New Year’s Eve in the company of friends and my romantic partner. Jorge drove, while I sat in the passenger seat listening to Xavier’s gravelly but upbeat voice. I began to cry and was having trouble speaking. I just kept repeating, “Thank you, thank you,” over and over again. Concerned, Jorge asked me what had happened.
At a loss for more words, all I could say was, “I’m free again, I’ve got my freedom and credibility back.” And with that, I pressed my body against his, and he hugged me tight with his right arm, his left hand still firmly on the steering wheel.
“You never lost your credibility,” he told me.
I replied simply, “What kind of credibility can a journalist have if they’ve been sentenced for defamation?”
I cried long and hard, as though I had a river flowing through my soul. But these were no longer tears of fear or disappointment, they were salt-tinged drops overflowing with newly won freedom and certitude, for the authorities had stripped me not only of my freedom but of my credibility as well, and now that I had them back, I could move forward.
On the ride home, I watched the jungle landscape slip past along the highway, the same jungle that had stared back at me, endless and dark, as I sat in a speeding car one year earlier, penned in by State Judicial Police agents and terrified. As though bearing my freedom aloft in a ritual act of homecoming, we returned home in silence, seeking out each other’s hands to hold from time to time, accompanied by the quiet joy of the music of Queen. I recalled the words of Eduardo Galeano: “Music holds the soul together.” It sure does, I thought.
As soon as we arrived at my home in Cancun, I picked up the phone and called my family and close friends; each one echoed the other’s thoughts, declaring that when we do right, the truth always prevails. I don’t know whether that’s entirely true, but I did feel the need to celebrate this first small victory of mine in the overwhelmingly large battle for justice. Shaking off the case against me was like rising out of a deep well and feeling my lungs fill with a sudden rush of air. Day and night, throughout it all, I would remember that I was just an ordinary citizen struggling against an ever-changing and shifting monster that uses governmental and criminal muscle to crush anyone and anything that gets in its way. I wanted to return to my tribe, to my family. To my origins, to all that had prepared me to resist and rebel against abuses of power.
A STRONG, UNITED, LOVING TRIBE
It was 1969. I was a girl of six, and my grandfather would plonk me down at his side, pour himself a glass of port, and tell me stories about how I’d gotten to be the way I was—forever asking and questioning, bold and fearless, never conformist, wild and affectionate. He was always telling me that ours was a family with a great many stories to tell, a great many questions to ask. In that irrefutable, sage tone of his, he would unravel the mystery of my eternal question—Why did I feel like this, all mixed up and restless, while the other girls didn’t? His answer was always the same: because I was a child of many cultures, because I had the blood of Portuguese sailors, Moorish conquerors, and strong, valiant Gallic women flowing in my veins. And there was my father’s family, too—on that side, I held within me the counsels of the conquered indigenous peoples of Mexico, and those of lone Mexican soldiers. That’s why I rebelled against authoritarianism and the forced imposition of ideas, my grandfather said (and he repeated it before he died), because it had fallen to me to do something with all that knowledge and pain passed down from my ancestors.
“This is what life after death is,” he said years later, referring back to those childhood conversations. “You carry your dead on your shoulders in your own life, you carry their wisdom and their stories.” One might easily think that my grandfather’s words were nothing more than the sentimental folly of a sweet old fool. But considering I have survived torture, a police kidnapping, and a brief but terrifying imprisonment, considering I have received death threats from organized criminal groups and experienced a number of attempts on my life, more than one might also say that my Grandpa Zeca knew what fate was holding in store for me.
My grandfather was a Portuguese man born into a line of peasants and sailors, of dark complexion and strong build, and tough as an ox; he had kind, sparkling eyes and large hands that were always ready to embrace, share, work the land, or write stories. No one ever had to teach him anything about poverty and injustice because he had experienced them firsthand. He was born in April 1909. One year later, on October 5, 1910, the First Portuguese Republic was created, and soon after came World War I. In January 1919 there was a brief civil war in the country, which lasted just one month and ended in Oporto, my grandfather’s land. He told me that monarchy aside, there wasn’t much difference between Portugal’s history and the history of Mexico. Between 1910 and 1926 alone, Portugal went through forty-six different governments; the people had no choice but to adjust rapidly to living with poverty and the ignominy of tyrants and corrupt politicians.
My grandfather married a French woman who was born in Lyon in April 1915, an intelligent woman with a prodigious memory, alabaster skin, and a pair of immaculate green eyes. She was the daughter of a woman who—according to those in the town where she lived—had the gift of clairvoyance; she could sense danger and see what lay in people’s futures. Having a social conscience was not an intellectual luxury for my grandparents; it was simply a way to survive in a Europe caught between wars and social upheavals. In 1931, he was twenty-two and she was sixteen; they had friends and family in France, Spain, and Portugal, and they quickly learned the importance of solidarity and political awareness.
My grandmother had a sweet smile, and she was an extraordinary student of history, one of those people who have an absolutely clear understanding of the fact that life is too short for regrets and that it is human pride that prevents us from recognizing that social uprisings are merely the tiny steps that clear the way for those who will come after us. Marie Rose, her shining, green eyes fixed on mine, would drill into me the notion that we must not allow life to dwindle away in the agonizing prison-labyrinth of fear of the enemy: “We are not building the present, we’re building the future. That’s why fear is actually a tool for our minds; it keeps us alert so that we can think and blaze a way forward.”
She was a master of simple pleasures, an extraordinary cook, a woman capable of glimpsing fate and contemplating the universe from the shores of her soul’s inner peace. The only time I ever knew her to be scared was when she was diagnosed with a brain tumor at age eighty. She passed away surrounded by my mother, my two sisters, and myself. And out in the vegetable patch the two had planted, my grandfather, lost in heaving sobs, felt his soul crumble with the pain of bearing witness to the death of his partner in love and life.
My grandfather was an explosive man and to know his wrath was to discover what even the most loving of men is truly capable of. She was the mistress of his inextinguishable, tender strength. Both liked to say that rebellion against all forms of slavery ran in our blood. They must have been on to something because they themselves rebelled, choosing to cross an entire ocean and settle in Veracruz. And they brought my mother, Paulette, along with them, so that she, too, could meet her manifest destiny.
Paulette was born in Lyon, France, in 1935, and it was at the age of six that she set sail for Mexico with her mother. While my grandfather was working to free himself from all the political entanglements back in France, my grandmother was being greeted on the opposite shore by friends who had fled during the war. Meanwhile, Portugal was under the rule of dictator Salazar, “God’s Anointed One,” and his highly feared political police force, the PIDE. Detractors of the regime were tortured and jailed at the Peniche and Caixas prisons and the Garrafal concentration camp. All around him, my grandfather’s different support networks were struggling to survive in a world dominated by Franco, Mussolini, and Hitler.
My grandmother told me how from 1936 to 1939, her friends fought for a new state against Franco in the Spanish Civil War, and how from 1939 to 1945, the madness of the Great War taught them the value of food and friendship as well as a love of life and an appreciation for social and inner peace.
My mother grew up in Mexico, in a home where life was celebrated—and death and injustice remembered—in frequent gatherings held with other wartime refugees. You could just as soon find them listening to a Chabela Vargas record as enjoying some fados sung by Amalia Rodríguez, who used to visit my grandparents’ house along with her guitarist. My mother felt Mexican, and she learned to be at ease in each of her two very different worlds.
When she was a teenager, she spent some time studying in France and Portugal, where she fell in love for the first time but nevertheless returned to Mexico. During a soirée she attended with her best friend Lucero at the home of a military engineer, she was introduced to a handsome man, tall and trim, with a deep voice, long eyelashes, and brows arched like two crows in flight. Shortly afterward, they found themselves pledging their eternal love before a priest in the Santa Rosa de Lima church in Mexico City.
I inherited my father’s strength of will as well as his eyes, his gaze. My longing for freedom was a gift passed down from my grandmother and grandfather, and my understanding of the real world was given to me by my mother; my two sisters and three brothers taught me that love is limitless just as long as we know how to forgive one another, as long as we learn to love each other for our similarities and explore our differences without starting a war over them. From my father’s father, a soldier who was known as somewhat of a lone wolf, I learned how heartrending it can be to watch a good man bend to the rules of machismo and live by the dogma of the patriarchy before finally self-destructing, old and alone.
My siblings and I grew up in an atmosphere where there were both difficult times and fun and games. We were raised by a serious, hardworking father and a cheerful mother—a psychologist and classical ballet dancer who liked to read us old Russian tales and was an avid soccer fan (a Club América fan, to be exact)—in a middle-class apartment in the Mixcoac colony of Mexico City. From a young age, I learned my address by heart, in case my tendency to get wrapped up observing people and listening to their stories—favorites among my many distractions—ended up leading me far from home. “My name is Lydia Cacho Ribeiro, I live at Donatello 25, apartment 104,” I would recite for my mother, who made me memorize our telephone number as well.
Before I was born my parents had two boys and a girl, and after me came a sweet, loving boy followed by the youngest of all, Myriam, who grew up to become a psychologist and shaman, an invaluable figure in my adult life, an ally in my battles for peace and equality.
In a painful series of deaths, I lost my grandmother, then my grandfather, and then on February 24, 2004, my mother bid me good-bye as I held her in my arms at the end of a extended battle with hepatic cancer.
My family is—just as my mother orchestrated it to be—a strong, united, and loving tribe. Together, we partake in various causes of peace and their exciting and joyful or bitter and disappointing outcomes. At the most trying of times, my sisters and my brothers are always there to chart a course through shared tears, to declare, “Enough with this outrage!” and to relax in one another’s company at a table bowed under the weight of dish upon dish of our grandmother’s best recipes.
“Just what are you made of,” Germán Dehesa asked me once in an interview, “that allows you to face such ignominy with a smile and keep your faith alive?”
“I was raised to never give up” was my reply.
And that is true. I was born in 1963 into an unconventional home. My mother held a degree in psychology, but her real vocation lay elsewhere than in private practice; she had no interest in becoming a master of the Freudian couch. She preferred to be out on the streets, working in Mexico City’s communities. She told me that when her friends asked her why she didn’t use her knowledge to earn some serious money, she would smile and insist—in that passionate voice she inherited from her father—that Mexico was plagued by inequality, that she had to do her part to promote equality, and that “you don’t build that from inside an office, you do it in the trenches, on the streets.”
My mother would take my siblings and me to what in those days were called “the lost cities” of Mexico’s capital. People live there among heaps of trash, in houses pieced together with cardboard, surviving in some cases on little more than a single tortilla a day. My mother, her brothers, and a group of young people were working to try to help the women and men living in these places to develop a sense of community, to demand schools, and to improve their way of life.
I can’t imagine that my mother could have had any idea just what effect seeing those little girls and boys in the slums on the outskirts of town would have on my soul, right down to its innermost depths. While she and her colleagues gave talks, I would attempt to play with my peers, only to discover with alarm how girls my age were physically unable to hold a pencil in order to make the simplest of drawings, how boys the same age as my brothers didn’t even have enough energy to kick around the ball we’d brought them as a present. They would just squat there on the loose dirt, their noses crusted over with dry snot, their tangled, matted hair grown into nests for tiny, jumping insects. When I discovered they ate a single meal of black beans and tortillas a day—and sometimes only tortillas—I despaired.
At that young age, somewhere between seven and ten, a child has no idea what to do with the strange feeling brewing inside her that some omnipresent force is lying to us and controlling our reality. A child’s understanding of the cruelty of poverty and corruption is entirely devoid of any ideological implications; that’s precisely why the emotions evoked by it are so intense, even leading to feelings of anxiety. We are educated in the idea that we are all equal, but the real-life differences between us appear insurmountable, and the answers adults give us are never enough to counter what our innocent eyes see out there in the world, all that we come to question. We begin to perceive some flicker of the truth, but then our schoolteachers spend a lifetime training us to doubt the wisdom of our intuition, to second-guess that part of our conscience that is so well attuned to feelings of human compassion and prompts us to ask ourselves why this or that person has to live a life mired in poverty, violence, and ignorance, while we wonder what it is that makes us so different.
At some point in their own childhood, these teachers were told that this is the way the world works; with a single blow, the intuitive child within them, the feeling girl or boy who refused steadfastly to believe the prevailing discourse of violence as a instrument of control, was destroyed. Some became victims of racism, physical abuse, machoism, or sexism, while others took it upon themselves to execute, enforce, and perpetrate the “one true Mexican reality.” I later learned patriarchy was the name of that socio-political system I grew up to reject and confront.
But millions of us grew to understand that cultural values are simply constructs of the human mind and that anything built can be transformed. Then some of us, although not all of us, chose to act accordingly. To contemplate giving one’s life to defend an ideal is not, in this context, a reaction to some vacuous notion of self-sacrificing heroism. Rather it is the product of ideological conviction and—surprising though it may seem—a deep love of life and a desire to live happily, with dignity.
In my own case, thankfully, neither my mother nor my teachers tried to snuff out my budding intuition. On the contrary, they did their best to feed it, to set me on the path of philosophy, debate, and reading. I discovered the concept of otherness, as well as my own right to live a life of dignity, free from violence. In a Mexico where nothing good comes to women who dare speak a word of protest, I learned to rebel. And life, with its gradual accumulation of hardships, taught me to cloak my defects and cultivate my virtues in the best way I could. My mother kept quoting Carl G. Jung, reminding us that contradiction between subjective assumptions and external facts is what gives rise to problems. Most of my teen friends wanted to cling to their innocent childhoods; I on the other hand could not wait to become an adult woman to be able to do things about what I saw as a chaotic society in which I felt like an outcast, a rebellious angry girl.
I have never been faint of heart. Like my nephew Santiago, I was born with the fearlessness of a Portuguese sailor setting out to sea in search of new life. “E se mais mundo houbera, lá chegara,” as my grandfather used to say—meaning the world might be bigger and vaster than you think, and one must search for the hidden secrets of humankind. As a girl, I had no trouble lifting up wriggling spiders by their legs; I would write on any scrap of paper I could get my hands on, and scribble all over the walls. At the age of five, seated atop my tricycle, with a magic cape knotted around my neck, I launched myself off the roof of our building’s garbage shed to prove that I could fly. A fractured tailbone and two weeks spent under virtual house arrest enlightened me to the fact that Aladdin and his flying carpet were, alas, just a fairy tale. I would awake at night and ask my sister if the starry sky, the ceiling of the Universe, could fall down and cover our heads while we slept. And once, after a nun explained to me that God is everywhere and sees everything, I asked my mother how I might send a letter to the Supreme Being in order to request that He cover His eyes when I went to the bathroom, because I didn’t like the idea of Him seeing me in such a state.
My mother’s friends warned her that she shouldn’t be bringing us up that way—socially maladjusted, rebellious, and confronted from a very young age with the truth of suffering in society—not to mention answering all our questions on any topic—including sexuality and abuses of power—as though we were adults. Her response was that being a mother doesn’t make you anyone’s keeper but rather a guide, someone responsible for human beings that must one day leave the nest and go out into the world. “Daughters and sons are given to you for a short time; they don’t belong to you, they’re human beings, individuals taking shape in order to consciously become the best possible version of who they are. I much prefer to raise a tribe of maladjusted women and men than a gaggle of mediocre specimens,” she’d explain to us. Her passion was Portuguese, like her father’s, and her convictions as unshakable as cathedral walls.
My mother trusted us. That’s why when I was a child and would ask her why there were so many poor people, so many boys living in dumps and girls using shawls to carry around babies born out of violence, she would reply, “It’s unfair, I know! And because you and your brothers and sisters can see the suffering and understand it, because you have the privilege of getting an education and three meals a day, it is your duty to prepare yourselves to help change the future of your country.”
Sometimes we’d just stop asking, because to conceive of your self as part of a national tragedy is a notion that no adolescent girl can truly contemplate without resistance. I would much rather go to the Casa del Lago cultural center in the Chapultepec forest, where I took free painting lessons and could dream up sweet, idyllic watercolor universes and then build tents out on the patio of the house where my friends and I would mount expeditions to Egypt in search of the lost treasures of the pharaoh Hatshepsut.
Years later, my mother invited me to join her on some workshops with groups of teenagers; I rebelled against such uncertainty. I loved my school—Colegio Madrid—and its liberal atmosphere, where students could debate ideas without having to conform to the patriarchal designs of submissive, artificially beautiful women. But I hated mathematics and any other subject that seemed useless to me. I didn’t care whether I passed or failed these courses; I preferred literature. I wanted nothing more than to write about everything going on around me and to play basketball. Several of my closest friends are from that period of my life.
My mother urged me to study arts at the Casa de la Cultura Mixcoac, one of the first cultural centers in Mexico City. It was all we could afford, so I spent a few afternoons a week in literature, poetry, or painting workshops, or in history courses taught by Dr. Ballester, founder of the city’s Hellenic Cultural Center. It is to him that I owe my knowledge of the rebelliousness of Aspasia of Mileto and my desire to travel to Greece and follow in the footsteps of Pericles.
Years later, when I turned sixteen, my mother founded an organization for the development of women, and my sisters and I completed a program that would allow us to lead workshops there. Then one day I moved to Paris, to relearn the language of my ancestors. I cleaned houses to make a living, until at the age of twenty-three, after several years of studying, traveling, and working, I decided that I needed to go and live by the sea, to get in touch with the sailor residing deep within my soul, the one my grandpa Zeca had talked so much about. And rising up before me was an image of Cancun as an unspoiled paradise, a terra incognita, an appleless Eden.
I had first seen the Cancun and Cozumel coast on a trip years earlier, when I learned to scuba dive at the age of seventeen, and I immediately fell in love with the sea and the jungle; the clear water caves and the wilderness reminded me that life on the earth is good, regardless of the cruelty people embody. I promised myself that one day I would burn my ships in order to settle in the tropics. It turns out I had no ships to burn, other than an English boyfriend who didn’t share my sense of adventure. But I nevertheless gathered up my few belongings—mostly books and music records—and set out for a new life of inwardness to find my own voice, in search the honest rhythm of the revolutionary feelings that I had been nesting for a while.
I wanted to write by the sea, to set sail, to know and understand the world as well as my own place in it. I hoped to find inner peace as I paddled around under the waves. I had just gotten my official certification as a scuba diver from some friends of my brother Oscar’s. This handful of marine biologists had helped me venture into the silent, submarine world where we learned to love the planet from within its very own reservoirs of life-giving liquid. I had found Paradise, some said—peace to understand life and all its miracles, said I.
Cancun had come into existence just twelve years before. It was an eminently masculine society, made up of construction workers and engineers, which led to the creation of a superficial and somewhat prostituted community of capitalists, moneymakers, and money launderers that clashed with the eco-scientists, musicians, hippies, and writers in search of their own kind of paradise.
At its inception, the city was meant to be a beacon for investment and capital, and its planning was entirely lacking in cultural or educational foresight. Women came later and had to adapt themselves to a strange world that had neither hospitals nor schools but did have plenty of cantinas and brothels. The state’s capital city, Chetumal, itself had a long history as a corrupt border town founded by contraband smugglers and marauders. Chetumal was originally a prison town for guerrillas and Zapatista revolutionary leaders. They mixed and matched smugglers, contractors, petty thieves, and revolutionary prisoners to create a political culture of corruption and extortion. These same groups later gave rise to the city’s political class. All of which—despite the fact that businessmen from all over would then descend upon the region and alter its landscape, some with good intentions and others with money to be laundered or an unsavory past to escape from—goes a long way toward explaining why Cancun is the way it is today.
A few months after arriving, I began to write stories—short cultural pieces for the local newspaper, Novedades. After a while I met a woman who would become a dear friend of mine. Lía was married to a hotel manager, and she and her friends were hungry for culture, social integration, and good schools for their young daughters and sons. We organized the first of the several conferences my mother would give in Cancun on sexuality, relationship dynamics, and women’s rights.
Shortly afterward, I met Salvador, who had been a successful dentist in Mexico City before he, too, decided to burn his ships and follow his childhood dream to become a sailor. At his side, I learned to sail, and eventually the two of us graduated as sailing captains in Florida to chart our own routes and courses. We made a pact to sail around the world together. I became an expert sailor, and on board a friend’s boat, I learned how to harpoon fish so that we would have something to eat whenever we went out on the high seas. We made several trips around the islands of the Caribbean with another couple on a thirty-eight-foot Irwin sailboat. During one of those voyages, on which I was always the official cook, an intense storm that left my body frozen in fear taught me to always breathe deeply, come what may; on another, we found ourselves having to flee together in our friend Pepe’s boat from modern-day pirates and drug traffickers off the coast of Belize. But the rest of our trips were calm affairs, full of love and fun. I would always pack two suitcases: one small one with my bikinis and a few articles of lightweight clothing, and one large one filled with books and notebooks, everything I needed to read, write, and draw.
On the first long voyage we took, from Miami to Guatemala’s Rio Dulce and from there on to the Cayman Islands, we spent nearly four whole hours snorkeling one afternoon. As we floated in the cool, calm Caribbean waters, I was unaware of any physical pain. What wonders of marine life were before me, entire families of turtles and dolphins, sharks minding no one but themselves! But by the time we got back to the boat, my legs had grown numb, to such an extent that I was unable to stretch my muscles even slightly in order to relieve the cramping pains.
I remembered this day fifteen years later, on the night of December 16, 2005, when during my “police kidnapping,” the State Judicial Police agents who were torturing me asked if I could swim, and one of them told me they were planning on throwing me into the sea once we got to Champotón, in Campeche. My legs felt numb then, too, paralyzed with adrenaline and weariness—the pain felt familiar and it reminded me of that sailing trip with Salvador.
While the agents joked about throwing me out to sea, a wave of conflicting emotions washed over me. Yes, I can, I can swim, I thought. Just like that day we were out on the sailboat; I swam for four hours. But now I was sick, just getting over a case of infectious bronchitis, and I had a fever I couldn’t shake. And in the battle raging in my mind between hopefulness at my chances for survival and the fear that was keeping my mind alert, I first pictured myself feeling strong, having plenty of stamina, swimming, watching as terra firma drifted farther and farther off and the waves carried me away from the police agents, safe and sound, seeking out the help of a night fisherman. But then I felt my cramped, useless legs and felt myself sinking, helplessly spent, into the sea.
Salvador and I were married for thirteen years. Throughout that time, I wrote stories dealing with women living in southeastern Mexico’s Maya region. In 1988 my mother introduced me to a friend of hers, Esperanza Brito de Martí, an extraordinary, wise, and loving elder woman. I had coffee with her one day, and I told her that I had taken a few journalism courses and attended several literature workshops, and that although I was essentially self-taught, I hoped to become a real journalist. Esperanza laughed at me—she had an acid sense of humor I would later come to understand and enjoy—then she asked me to write her an essay explaining why it was impossible to be a good self-taught journalist. And so with Esperanza running the magazine FEM, I began writing for it. FEM was the Mexican equivalent of Ms., the American feminist magazine cofounded by Gloria Steinem.
Alaíde Foppa and several friends of hers founded FEM in the 1970s. This was at the same time that women in my mother’s generation were coming into their own and out of the closet as feminists. My mother was in touch with the European feminist philosophers such as Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray, whilst most Mexican feminists had adopted the American women’s movement discourse more linked to the civil rights movement and the anti-war upheaval. Alaíde Foppa, Rosario Castellanos, Tina Modotti, Marcela Lagarde were the Latin American women bringing together feminist philosophy and political rebellion for women and girls in my country. I listened to them on the radio, I read their poetry and their essays again and again. They made my generation believe we could become their living utopia of empowered women, agents of change, owners of our destiny.
I was first turned on to FEM when I was in high school, and when I read the things these women were writing, I realized that they were expressing exactly what I had been thinking and feeling all along—I knew there had to be another tribe out there beyond my own family, one I could belong to, one in which I would have the freedom to make my own choices, to think for myself, to reimagine and re-create the world. Back then I never imagined that I would one day have the privilege of seeing my words find a home among those of my teachers, that I would be brought under the welcoming wing of women like Esperanza and Alaíde, or Marcela Lagarde, the friends and pupils of Simone de Beauvoir, readers of Susan Sontag and Gloria Steinem.
In 1989 I met journalist Sara Lovera, the teacher of an entire generation of provincial female journalists and the founder of La Doble Jornada, the first feminist supplement to be published in the major national newspaper La Jornada. Controversial, passionate, at times intolerant and gruff, Sara was first my teacher and later my friend, as well. I attended workshops and certificate programs in investigative journalism, feature writing, and reporting. I felt right at home as I came into contact with numerous journalists who were also working as women’s rights activists. I began publishing pieces in the national media before working up the courage to start my own editorial column in Cancun’s La Crónica, a paper run by Fernando Martí, Esperanza’s son. Back then I went to Mexico City to buy books—the entire collection of Ryszard Kapuscinsky, everything written by Eduardo Galeano, Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, and the German journalist who later became a friend and an advisor when I began investigating mafias: Gunter Wallraf.
Ever since that first column in La Crónica, I have never gone a day, not even a single bleary Monday, without writing. And when La Crónica eventually disappeared (as a result of a hostile outburst by then-governor Mario Villanueva Madrid, whose ties to the Cartel of Sinaloa landed him a spot in the Altiplano detention center and later an extradition to the US where he is still paying for money laundering for organized crime). I found myself writing for several different papers over the years—Novedades, Por esto!, and La Voz del Caribe.
I went on to write articles for La Doble Jornada and diverse feminist magazines, I published a book of poems, and I spent a good deal of time out and about, camera in hand, interviewing people, trying to understand what life was like for them in this made-up paradise in the Southeast corner of Mexico.
In 2003 Sara Lovera and Lucía Lagunes of Mexico, Mirta Rodríguez Calderón of Cuba, Rosalinda Hernández and Laura Asturias of Guatemala, and I cofounded the Mexico, Central America, and Caribbean Journalists’ Network. This international network gradually shifted its focus to an analysis of the world from a gender perspective. At the time of its creation, I was a correspondent for the news agency CIMAC, and I happily joined this new family of women and men who shared—and continue to share—the dream of practicing a form of journalism that is ethical, professional, and non-sexist. At the beginning we were twelve; by 2016 the network has more than six hundred members all over the Spanish-speaking world.
I learned to combine my journalism and activist work with a private life that gave me spiritual balance. Throughout this period, Salvador and I would often spend time on a small boat, simply sailing around, reading, talking and making love. This allowed me the chance to lose myself in works of literature, to write in my diaries, and to start down the path of Buddhist literature. I meditated morning and night and learned how to deal with my emotions in a way that complemented what I had learned from my psychologist mother, who had taught me to question everything, to understand and analyze myself, and to accept my emotions in order to transform them. My forays into Buddhism and a daily yoga practice taught me new ways of structuring my inner peace in a constant search of balance with my obsessive behavior to do many things at the same time, to write and disclose, to investigate and to find explanations for what seemed inconceivable, such as systematic femicide or pervasive child abuse perpetrated by family members. I began to branch out, and while I continued to be involved in writing political analysis, I began to publish a newspaper column on Saturdays and eventually became the editor of a local magazine.
I did a report on HIV/AIDS, interviewing a group of young, gay, HIV-positive individuals who asked me to tell the true story of the institutional abuses suffered by people with the virus. I agreed to their request, and after journeying into the belly of the beast and coming into contact with fear, sickness, and discrimination in hospitals and morgues, my dear friend Lía and I helped them create a nonprofit organization. We secured an abandoned building and with the help of my husband, Salvador, transformed it into the region’s first hospice for HIV/AIDS patients. The time I spent in this world of paradoxes, pain, discrimination, and death forever changed my life.
Lía and I became versed in first aid treatments, and several of the young men whose tenderness and courage had secured them a spot in our hearts later ended up dying in our arms, abandoned by their own families, who feared the modern-day pest. Then one fine afternoon, as a young man named Carlos left my trembling, tear-filled eyes to contemplate the overpowering presence of death, I knew that he would be the last person I would allow to pass away in my arms. I decided to set out in search of life again, to explore the world of HIV prevention, to write about it—to try to find the light amid the darkness. The mood of psychic despair, depression, and abandonment of that young generation of gay men could not be soothed by poetry or friendship. I recall so many days and nights reading out loud the most beautiful poems by Emily Dickinson, Garcia Lorca, Neruda, and Walt Whitman, hoping their souls—and mine—would find solace in the fine words of others, as mine had failed me a while ago. I had no explanation for a decade of official denial of HIV/AIDS, for the cruelty and abandonment of the ill. I was never afraid of contracting the virus, but I was secretly afraid of finding comfort in death.
I signed up for a United Nations program and went to New York on a United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) project. There I met two women who changed my life: Stephanie Urdang, a South African journalist in charge of the Gender HIV/AIDS program, and Madhu Bala-Nat, a Hindu expert in charge of the UN Joint Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) link to UNIFEM. To this day I cherish their friendship and am in awe of their knowledge and ability to navigate in the awful bureaucracy at the UN in order to make the best out of the worst.
After my trip to New York I flew to Senegal, Africa, and as I stood there in an orphanage, surrounded by hundreds of parentless girls and boys all suffering from AIDS, my feet suddenly felt the entire weight of life bearing down on them, all the consequences of death and silence. It was then that I decided to explore the tragedy of this pandemic. To this day, I have never shaken the weight of the apocalyptic vision of hundreds of children’s eyes boring into mine, perhaps trying to find in my expression a lost mother’s face, in my gestures a dead father’s arms. I can still feel myself surrounded by the singular scent on the skin of those small human beings who held their arms out to me, yearning for a little human warmth from someone who would not spurn them; “A kiss, a kiss” they would beg when we visited them in their hospice, its corrugated metal roof burning under the sub-Saharan African sun. A reporter is never supposed to get personal, the great teachers of journalism wrote in their books; theory meant nothing to me during that month in Africa, so I hugged them for hours, I played with raggedy dolls, I told them stories in French, and they taught me a few words in Wolof. We sang together and among them I became a child. Back at the hotel at night I cried and wrote long love letters to my husband.
I wrote reports and articles, I appeared on television and radio shows, and I traveled to several countries as well as throughout my own, listening to the stories of thousands of women who found themselves languishing under the yolk of the human immunodeficiency virus. Never have I felt so moved and simultaneously so useless as when I stood before the United Nations General Assembly Hall and explained the situation of women and girls with HIV/AIDS in Mexico. I returned several times to that historic building in New York, where the dignity of nations and the misery of their inhabitants are the subjects of debate and negotiation. And I felt emptier than ever. All the speaking and writing—what good does it do anyone, apart from feeding my own ego when I get to see my name in print? And so I turned my eyes once more to Mexico, to the jungle near Cancun.
I spent countless hours with my mother, hatching plans for the creation of a horizontally integrated women’s organization, one that would allow us to grow, become strong, and help other women without falling victim ourselves to either the political system or the macho, patriarchal order. Our women’s organization quickly began to bear fruit, several men joined forces with us, as well, and our dream became a reality.
A group of friends, women who believed that a different world was possible, founded a nonprofit called Estas Mujeres [These Women], where we held workshops on civil rights and equality. Our feminist group was a success; Bettina, Celina, Miren, Mariarosa, Priscila, Guillermina, and I were “the only crazy women in town” talking about gender equality and the possibility of women taking a stand against violence in Cancun. María Rosa Ochoa, a cultural columnist and theater actress, suggested that we produce a radio show that we later called Estas Mujeres. That project lasted several years and was a great success. On the show, we called upon women to defend their rights. These women spoke invariably about the violence they suffered as being an obstacle that limited their ability to work, to be free, and to be happy. They spoke about their father’s sexual abuse, their husband’s rape, their boss’s sexual harassment; they talked about all sorts of discrimination, be it of race or gender. Unbeknownst to us, we opened the Pandora’s box of our corner of paradise—we mentioned the unmentionable, and for that we had to pay our dues.
I was working as an editor at the magazine Cancuníssimo. My associate, Vicente Álvarez, and I came up with a plan to create a magazine that would serve as a forum where women could discuss their issues. To test out the idea, I began by writing a supplement in a local newspaper called Esta voz es es mía [This Voice Is Mine], and when we saw the overwhelming reaction of readers, we threw ourselves headlong into the creation of the new magazine, which we called Esta boca es mía [This Mouth Is Mine]. Shortly thereafter, we produced a television show of the same name, which enjoyed wide regional acclaim. We were breaking down paradigms—feminist programming on Televisa? Yes. A complete success. Until, that is, the holder of the broadcasting license canceled the show five years later because he “considered it obscene” for us to be speaking openly about such topics as female condoms and the G-spot. It was all right to portray women as victims of violence, especially indigenous women, but censorship fell upon us in the year 2003 for speaking about empowerment and female sexual freedom.
Abused women would show up at the radio or television station asking for help. We would refer them to the Federal Public Ministry, but their requests for assistance would be turned down. The authorities said there was nothing that could be done for these women, because the law established that spousal battery was not a crime if the resulting injuries cleared up in less than fifteen days. And so the women would return to the radio station and tell of their troubles at the Attorney General’s Office.11 We brought this group of women together into a formal organization and decided to advocate for a change in the laws that would allow violence against women to be prosecuted as a crime. It took more than ten years to achieve the integral law we now have, but we managed to locate some congressmen willing to bring the law up for debate. By mid-2007, the Ley General de Acceso a las Mujeres a una Vida Libre de Violencia [General Law on the Right of Women to a Life Free from Violence] was passed in the state of Quintana Roo as well as the rest of Mexico.
With institutional support lacking, and in the wake of a wave of publicity we had managed to garner for the topic in the press and on television, victims of domestic abuse started to come to us. Then one afternoon, discussions with these women brought us to a decision—we would open a formal space for the protection of domestic abuse victims. My experience with the HIV hospice acted as a foundation for the creation of this second nonprofit organization.
A single dramatic experience would then change my perception of gender violence forever. I was returning from an investigative trip in the state of Guanajuato, in central Mexico, and paused in my journey to take a break at a truck stop. A slim but muscular blond man followed me into the women’s restroom. When I came out of the stall to wash my hands, he sprang at me, immobilizing me. He then attacked me, raped me, and left me for dead. When I eventually dared to move again, I telephoned my mother. I was taken to a hospital in an ambulance to Mexico City; I had a few broken bones, a dislocated arm and hip, and several fractured ribs. Naturally, I only learned all of this at the hospital; I was completely unable to explain to the doctor how I had managed, given my injuries, to stand up and walk out of the restroom under my own strength. Quite simply, I had experienced the power of adrenaline and the will to survive.
Once I was discharged from the hospital, I went through my entire recovery process in the company of my family, and I had one of the most powerful epiphanies of my life. I suddenly understood the great importance of these networks of unconditional support, like the one I was so lucky to have in my family and closest friends.
The experience was a wrenching one. Among other lessons, I realized that I had behaved quite cavalierly when I had previously had the nerve to ask victims of violence to bare their souls to me in interviews. When the unforeseeable circumstances of life then forced me into their position, I felt that I should avail myself of that same nerve, and steel myself. It was one of the great lessons in humility of my existence. I came across a United Nations statistic stating that every eighteen seconds, a woman or girl is raped in Mexico. Why was I any different? Perhaps because I’m a journalist of some notoriety in my own city? No, I’m just another Mexican woman trying to survive in her homeland. And neither I nor any other person deserves to be a victim of violence.
Time passed, and with my arm still in a sling and a few broken bones that hadn’t quite yet healed, I returned to Cancun. In the meantime, my marriage of thirteen years was about to come to an end, for reasons of diverging interests. We had each grown in opposite directions, and so three months after my return we decided to separate. I left our home and moved into a small apartment that I had been using for several years as a studio. Little by little, I reconstructed my life on my own. I was happy; I felt I could do whatever I wanted without having to worry about anyone or anything. I found new sources of strength, and I began confronting my fears and transforming my pain into positive projects and actions.
One morning I went to meet with my colleagues and friends in our favorite coffee shop. My friend Ruben, who used to be the editor-in-chief of Por esto!, told me that his sources had confirmed governor Mario Villanueva was responsible for the attack back in Guanajuato. It was his way of taking revenge for our journalistic work. We were never able to prove that he gave the order for me to be raped in that bathroom, but years later when he was sentenced in the US for his ties to organized crime, a man that used to be a part of his security detail corroborated the information.
We finally opened the women’s aid center and high-security shelter. Right when we had located a suitable building and were preparing to outfit it accordingly, the friends with whom I had planned everything pulled out of the project. They said it was too much for them—they had families of their own, and victim assistance wasn’t their area of expertise. Some of them were afraid of the potential retaliation from the powerful husbands of the women who began seeking our assistance. At that point, I turned to my mother.
“This project is indispensible,” she told me, “and women will come” whose destiny it is to be a part of this mission. She was right; the project gained an unimaginable strength and local community power.
Slowly but surely, those extraordinary people did come, and they built a strong, solid, professional space in which women and their children could rebuild their lives and regain their right to dream and live with dignity, free from violence.
The first to join the mission were Fernando Espinosa, director of the Fundación Oasis, and Guillermo Portella, a Spanish hotel owner who was inspired by our project and secured the donations we required to open the aid center and shelter. Our victim assistance model requires two separate facilities: a public day center providing free legal and social work services as well as psychological and personal security assistance, and a high-security shelter on the outskirts of the city where domestic abuse victims whose lives were in danger could take refuge with their children for periods ranging from three to six months while we worked with them in a safe space, helping them to resolve their situation and draw up a plan to rebuild their lives.
Next, I contacted Claudia, a psychologist and feminist; Edith, a social worker; Magdalena, head nurse; and Irma, our sweet, energetic administrator. We found a small house in which to set up and inaugurate the women’s crisis center, which we organized following an American shelter model. When we began to realize that many of the victims coming to us for assistance and protection were married to or involved in relationships with members of the police force or syndicates such as the taxi drivers’ union (which is known to be running protection rackets), I began to use my investigative reporting skills to find out just who we were up against. We then worked quickly, in conjunction with victims and other social networks, to develop a security and investigation model that would take this important information into account.
Some of the women we saw had fallen victim to the actions of men of great power—to drug lords or individuals tied to organized crime and the trafficking of women and children—and others to construction workers, middle-class men, peasants, or bricklayers, or to chauvinist businessmen and politicians.
At a national conference on human rights, I met Alicia Leal and her Alternativas Pacíficas de Monterrey [Monterrey Peaceful Alternatives] team from Nuevo León. They were the first to open a high-security shelter for domestic violence victims in Mexico. She invited me to join a small group of people working to create a network of women’s shelters across the country. We signed right up. I used the skills I developed in creating the journalists’ network to embark on this new endeavor.
Necessity forced me to take over the running of our Comprehensive Women’s Care Center (CIAM), namely because nobody wanted the director’s job. I set about reading books on criminology and victimology, and I signed up for training courses at the Texas-based National Training Center for Domestic and Sexual Violence, run by Debby Tucker, my dear friend and amazing teacher. I attended the courses while still managing a magazine; my journalist’s salary went to cover part of the admission costs. Little by little, various journalist and businessmen friends began sponsoring our staff members, underwriting their salaries. But the Mexican IRS22 would not approve our nonprofit’s tax-deductible status until we were able to demonstrate that we had been working continually in victims’ assistance for a minimum of two years. We were trying to achieve what was already a reality in other countries—we wanted Congress to assign public resources to cover part of our operating costs. After all, victim protection is a responsibility of the state, and nonprofit organizations such as ours merely share in the collective duty to work for the betterment of citizens’ lives. Our goal was to see public policy against violence become institutionally enshrined.
To that end, I began to study the history of shelters for battered women in other countries. We learned of a sizable number of instances in which women had been killed by their partners, sometimes at the very doors of the shelters in which they were seeking refuge, their aggressors having figured out their whereabouts. And such incidents occurred across the United States and Spain, as well as in Mexico and the United Kingdom. We decided to develop an investigation strategy that might help put us a step ahead of the perpetrators of these types of assault, while I used my journalistic work to denounce acts of corruption on the part of both aggressors and judicial authorities. I spoke with the CIAM team and we came to a unanimous decision: If we were going to work to build peace, we would inevitably have to confront the most brutal forms of violence, and to do so, we would need to have peaceful, intelligent, innovative, and—most important—professional strategies at our disposal.
I learned to appreciate my youth and my obsessive stamina as I kept three jobs at the same time. My only salary came from my job as a freelance journalist and magazine editor, so at night I would write articles and essays that I’d sell to magazines throughout the world. Ever since we opened the shelter I decided I would never have a salary as a human rights advocate. We were working toward getting public money invested in our organization, so I found it unethical to receive public money as an activist while continuing to investigate and write about gender issues, fighting the powers that be. Many friends questioned what they called an extreme decision. In time I knew I did the right thing. My enemies—drug lords, human traffickers, and corrupt politicians—were looking for something fishy in the organization’s books, yet they never found it. In a country like Mexico where almost everyone has a small corruption crime under the pillow, I had to make sure mine was free of anything other than a small sandman ghost. My obsession with accountability and transparency was applicable not only to the public officials I was investigating, it applied first and foremost to myself. My father taught me that peace of mind comes from being coherent in one’s actions and words, and if I was determined to promote and defend the right to have rights, I really needed the biggest protection of them all: honesty and knowledge.
When I turned thirty-seven, everything I had learned about journalism and human rights advocacy came together—the pieces of the puzzle finally all fit, everything made sense. I was up for the task, or at least I believed myself to be.
We set up a variety of international networks, some aimed at training, some at protection, others at information gathering—networks of like-minded, mutually supportive organizations working together to keep one another out of harm’s way. One afternoon, my good friend journalist Ricardo Rocha, who had come to Cancun to tour the CIAM shelter, said these words to me: “A good reporter should investigate every story as though it’s the last one they will ever cover in their life.” Taking this advice to heart, we investigated every story of violence that the women we were protecting brought to us. Our team was now juggling seventy cases a month involving women whose lives were in danger, most of them due to human trafficking, forced prostitution, and domestic violence; meanwhile, society at large lived in a state of willful ignorance regarding the true magnitude of the problem. Over the years, we have seen dozens and dozens of criminals, pedophiles, rapists, and potential perpetrators of femicide pay for their crimes. And even more importantly, we have witnessed how hundreds of survivors of these acts of violence were able to reconstruct their worlds without the fear of losing their lives for daring to stand up and declare: “Enough is enough!”
Among the various security strategies implemented at the shelter, we had digital video cameras installed to record the perimeter of the center twenty-four hours a day, in order to capture evidence of any attacks or threats that might come to be made, as well as recording the faces of the aggressors themselves. Following the first occasion on which death threats were received at the shelter—threats that were made by an arms dealer from Torreon who also acted as an informer for the Nuevo Leon attorney general—we purchased a specialized telephone device to record such threats to be able to hand them over to the authorities as evidence when required. We reported those first threats to the national Attorney General’s Office (PGR, Procuradía General de la República) and the Assistant Attorney General’s Office for Special Investigations on Organized Crime (SEIDO, the Mexican equivalent of the DEA), just as we would do years later, at the end of 2003, when Jean Succar Kuri threatened me over the phone.
I visited shelters similar to ours in New York, Texas and Spain, and over time we drew up a victims’ assistance model that was specifically adapted to the reality of our location, which, because of the high level of corruption and the utter lack of institutional justice in the Mexican system, was a radically different one than that of other countries. We knew what was being done in Torreon, in Aguascalientes, and in Mexico City, places where shelters for victims of abuse had been opened but were struggling because armed husbands or pimps would simply show up at the shelters and threaten the teams’ lives. Alicia Leal in Monterrey, the extraordinary lawyer Luz Castro in Chihuahua, and Ester Chávez and her Casa Amiga team in Juarez were all experiencing the same attacks. Each of them was working to protect women in her respective city, but all of them were essentially defenseless—abandoned by the state, mistrustful of corrupt local police, and threatened by a variety of aggressors. The women and men who make up these organizations are, nevertheless, transforming the nation, and all of them consider that their work is well worth the risk.
At this point, we were living our lives caught between the beacons of hope and a yearning for freedom from violence on the one hand, and the dark shadows of injustice and abuse of power on the other. Jesús, the kindhearted therapist in whom I’ve been depositing my innermost worries this past year, once gave me the following advice: “You must learn to carry a lantern in one hand, to light your path; to carry a knife in the other, to defend yourself; and to not be blinded by the light.” I came to the understanding that being a pacifist and working to eradicate violence does not mean bowing to the wills of others but rather learning to defend yourself while still holding true to your principles.
One morning a powerful local drug dealer who used to rape his children and batter his wife came to the crisis center. He had a shotgun and was accompanied by two other gunmen armed as if they were going to war. “Potenciano” (his alias) yelled at us from the outside, “Bring my wife or bring Lydia Cacho. I will kill you both for defying me.” We immediately called the police, they arrived, and once they saw the military weapons the gang members were bearing, they quietly bowed out. On the phone, I desperately asked the chief of police why his men had left. He answered calmly, with what sounded like shame on his voice: ”Listen, Señora, give the guy his wife and children back, or they will kill you all.”
I was in my office, accompanied by our team’s psychologist, our lawyer, and our social worker. We stared at each other as I hung up after calling the police chief something along the lines of “a useless coward.” I then proceeded to spend an hour talking to the gunman through the video-porter system, telling him we did not have his family. He said he was going to kill me and then shot at the crisis center. Finally after several calls we were able to get the Federal Police to arrive; two patrols came, they talked to the men, and just like that the gunmen got into their cars and left. We had everything on tape. The next day I gathered the entire team from the shelter and the crisis center and introduced them to a judo instructor. For days he taught us all—from the nurses and social workers to the driver and the psychologists—how to take a gun away from an attacker. We practiced and practiced until we got a hold of it. We then created a risk analysis protocol and a safety instruction manual to rescue victims who find themselves in situations of extreme danger. We trained for months. Many people came to help us; a friend of mine who used to belong to a SWAT team reviewed our protocols and instructed me for two hours every night for four months, until I knew how to handle everything from kidnappings to death treats, from group crisis to how to attend to gunshot wounds. Everyone on the team knew the rules: We were to always travel in pairs, and we all had satellite radios that back then were only used by criminals or specialized police forces. We understood this was war: the trenches were the streets, the homes of millions of families, the shelter’s door. We saved money to have the main doors armored, including bulletproof glass. We were pacifists but we refused to be victimized by losing sight of the dangers involved in defending the rights and freedoms of others. As a journalist I knew every fact has to be backed by evidence, so we had cameras installed everywhere, with 24-hour recordings sent to a remote hard disk.
The Succar case would put to the test the principles I had stood fast by my entire life. When the mafia demons eventually came, we had already spent years building up our networks and gaining experience; we had matured enough to face the heart of darkness.
