BRAVE GIRLS, IMPLACABLE TORMENTORS
In October 2003, Emma, a young girl with nut-brown hair and an innocent face, approached a former teacher of hers, Margaret, and asked her to help her report a man named Jean Succar Kuri for child pornography and rape. Margaret put her in touch with Verónica Acacio, a lawyer and the president of the nonprofit child-protection organization Protégeme [Protect Me], who agreed to represent her along with a number of other underage girls, and assist them with their case. On October 27, Quintana Roo state attorney general Celia Pérez Gordillo gave her authorization to the assistant attorney general to obtain video recordings of a conversation between Emma and Succar Kuri, with the aim of gathering evidence for the case. In the conversations taped at a local restaurant in Cancun, Succar admits to having raped girls as young as five. At this point, the Quintana Roo daily Por esto! had already been offering full, detailed coverage of the case blaming the girl victims who had somehow “sexually provoked the businessmen,” and a few days later all the papers in the state had picked up the story, now blaming the mothers of the victims for not being present. On October 29, business magnate Kamel Nacif and his lawyers orchestrated Succar Kuri’s escape, after receiving a warning that the latter was to be arrested the following day. I had begun documenting the case and investigating Succar Kuri. I invited Verónica, the lawyer, to my TV program to discuss child abuse and the unethical behavior of the authorities and the press that insisted on re-victimizing the victims and letting the abusers out of sight.
The very next day, October 30, Succar’s wife, Gloria Pita, telephoned Emma and her mother and warned them to retract the accusations against her husband, or else. Two phone calls were recorded—with the consent of the assistant attorney general—in which Gloria can be heard admitting clearly and specifically to having explicit knowledge regarding her husband’s acts of child rape and to being in possession of pornographic videos of Succar Kuri with several young girls. Among these, Gloria warned, were videos of Emma participating in sexual acts with her husband and other girls. The pornographer’s wife told the young girl she would make the videos public if she went ahead with the criminal case.
On November 2, Emma reported Jean Succar Kuri again, this time to the PGR, for child pornography and for having raped her repeatedly since she was thirteen years old, as well as her younger sister and her cousin, eight and nine years old respectively, and several other girls of six. In her testimony, she stated that Succar brought girls over from the United States in order to offer them to Kamel Nacif Borge, Miguel Ángel Yunes Linares, and Alejandro Góngora Vera; she also stated that Succar claimed to be under the political protection of renowned politician Senator Emilio Gamboa Patrón and that thanks to this association, he was untouchable. In the days after she filed her report, Emma sought out Óscar Cadena, who had risen to fame years earlier with his Televisa program Ciudadano infraganti, a poor imitation of 60 Minutes. Emma asked Óscar to interview her on his local TV show, because she feared her life was in danger as a result of having reported her rapist. Cadena agreed, and the interview was broadcast on local TV only to become a scandal that again placed the blame on the victim.
On November 4, a second underage girl gave her testimony to the police. She told how, beginning when she was six years old, Succar Kuri raped and filmed her. Another victim, still a girl at the time, gave her statement and testified that she met Succar Kuri when she was in kindergarten, at a neighbor’s home, and that he had begun abusing her when she was just five. Three more minors who had never even met Emma gave statements attesting to similar facts a few days later. I kept following the case while, at the same time, investigating two other cases of sex trafficking from Argentina and Venezuela to Cancun and Florida. Nightclubs were filled with young women from Colombia, Argentina, Venezuela, and the US; they publicized themselves in local newspapers, and male journalists and immigration officials would visit these pole dancing joints and brothels for free—after all, the owners wanted to have the press and authorities on their side. Ever since Colombian kingpin Pablo Escobar built his mansion in Tulum, on a piece of land offered to him by the governor of Quintana Roo, I had quietly followed the trails of drug traffickers in the Caribbean who bring young women and girls through the Belize and Guatemala borders. My source at the DEA in Cancun kept telling me to stay away from that issue. Human trafficking for sexual exploitation was not yet recognized by Mexican authorities at the beginning of 2003. The governors made sure the Caribbean destination had no bad press at all, and the fact that Colombian drug lords, Russian mafias, and Mexican cartels had settled here was supposed to be a secret. Anyone who dared to expose them was—accordingly to authorities—damaging the economy of a tourist state. Just two years earlier, in May 2001, ex-governor Mario Villanueva was arrested for his links to organized crime; even though the big news was published in The New York Times, many local reporters such as me and others working for La Crónica newspaper had been reporting on this fact for years. When I told my DEA source that I was studying the criminal phenomena of forced prostitution and international networks linked to the cartels, international mafias, and human smuggling, he warned me I might be left alone or worse yet . . . I would be persecuted.
On November 7, 2003, the Third Court issued a search warrant for the Solymar Villas, owned by Succar. Among the items found in the search was an envelope containing hundreds of pornographic photographs of girls from Mexico and other countries. Roughly 20 percent of these photos showed boys under the age of sixteen engaging in sexual relations with small girls or being abused by older men. According to the federal authorities, twenty compromising videos filmed by Succar himself were recovered in the search but later disappeared. A year later, Cancun police agents were discovered putting them up for sale at US$40,000 a pop.
The victims’ situation was becoming dangerous, and it was at this point that Emma came to me. She asked me to help her, as a journalist, to tell her story, because she was at risk of being murdered. She later agreed to allow CIAM Cancun to assist her and some of the other victims.
On November 12, international police organization INTERPOL announced that it had initiated an investigation against Jean Thouma Hanna Succar Kuri for “money laundering” and that the investigation would cover at least eight resort cities across the country—cities where Succar also owned residences, clothing and jewelry shops, restaurants, and other properties. Little by little, information came to light that pointed to the trafficking of minors for the purposes of exploiting them in the sex tourism industry, putting them at the service of affluent Mexican and American men. The girls and young women, unaware of the full magnitude of the situation, told how Succar had taken them to Los Angeles and Las Vegas, where they were forced to have sex with businessmen who were friends of their exploiter. They also explained that American girls were taken to Cancun to be exploited there, although none of them knew what had become of these girls afterward. Among the scores of pornographic photos recovered by the federal agents, there is one showing a small girl barely four years of age, with blond hair styled in a Prince Valiant cut, bound at the wrists and naked, and before her is the nude body of an older man with a large paunch, his erect penis positioned directly in front of the child’s frightened face.
Not even the federal agents assigned to the operation knew how to react to the feeling of revulsion these images provoked. Not even they, the professional investigators, could detach themselves from the impulse of fear such acts of cruelty generate. Every one of them, debating at length about possible criminological hypotheses, was struggling to find the right words to describe the fugitive pedophile and his accomplices. A sort of fellowship, born of the anguish caused by the extreme acts of brutality the evidence was pointing at, began to be felt by all those working to carry out a proper investigation and protect the victims. Fear permeated the entire atmosphere, and no one was immune to its effects, not even the most seasoned of federal agents. I saw more than one shed tears of grief and desolation at the simple thought that they might not be able to stop this network of pedophiles. Every one of us cried, some holding each other’s gaze silently, trying to control our breathing in order to continue the search for clues, and others in the privacy of our own homes as we wracked our brains in an attempt to understand what could possibly move these men to destroy the lives of such helpless beings. There were a plethora of questions, but the answers were few and fruitless. For a long while, the only thing that kept us going, kept us strong, was the thought of those girls’ bravery. If they, who had gone through all the seven circles of hell, were still capable of standing and telling their stories, then none of us had the right to give up.
THE MEETING / EMMA AND THE APARTMENT
One rainy evening in November 2003, some time after eight o’clock, I had just locked up the office to go home when my cell phone rang. It was a woman who had seen me on television; some mutual friend had given her my number. Very evidently distressed, she told me that there was a problem with a friend of her daughter’s and asked me to please come to her house because she had no idea how to deal with the situation. When I asked her if it was an emergency or if it could wait until the following day, she replied that it was a matter of life and death. I got in my Jeep, dug out a notebook and pen, and copied down her address. On the way I used my radio to call Claudia, the psychologist at the shelter, in order to let her know where I was going. If I did not call her within two hours it was important that she look for me. Safety was by then an everyday issue.
I drove to a middle-class neighborhood of government housing complexes made up of three-story buildings consisting of six or eight units each. The street was dark; it was the middle of hurricane season, and it had been raining. The rows of identical buildings made it hard to find the right address. I finally spotted it, next to a faded, crumbling wall. Before getting out of the car, I dialed the woman’s cell phone number to let her know that I had arrived; then I looked carefully around, pulled a canister of pepper spray out of my purse, and readied it in my hand. In the other hand the radio was ready to call in case of an emergency. I walked along the sidewalk, surrounded on all sides by an intense, unsettling blackness, until I reached the staircase leading up to the woman’s apartment. When I saw that she was waiting for me in the open doorway, I tucked the pepper spray back into my bag and gave her a quick wave.
I ducked into the apartment, where the woman greeted me with a kiss on the cheek and a look of desperation on her face. She was slender, about forty, with short hair gathered up at the back. Her expression was dark and sweet but veiled with anguish. She wore a flowery cotton dress and a lightweight pink sweater (it was a cool time of year, when locals can often be seen sporting sweaters and jackets). The apartment was very small, and the first thing I noticed were two girls—first the woman’s daughter, a beautiful, black-haired girl who was standing at her mother’s side, and then a young blond girl with fine features and brown eyes, her face distorted with fear and sobbing. Her face looked like dirty windows on a rainy night and her eyes were bloodshot from her heavy cries; she wrung her hands anxiously and looked at me in alarm, scrutinizing me in silence. It was the woman who spoke first.
“Well . . . this is Emma. I explained to her that I know you, that you have a television program and you help abused women. She saw your show and asked me to call you, because she needs help. If you need anything, please just let me know.” She offered me a glass of water, placed it hurriedly into my hands, and disappeared into the adjoining room, her arm around her daughter.
The young girl seated before me was experiencing a breakdown. She collapsed in tears and told me that she had reached her wits’ end, pleading with me to please help her. The television in the kitchen was switched on to a soap opera. The two of us were sitting on a tiny sofa near the window, not two yards from the small kitchen where the TV set hung from one wall. I moved to turn it off when she began speaking, in order to focus better on what she needed to tell me, but she stopped me abruptly; she told me not to turn it off, that we needed to have it on because the nightly newscast was going to mention something about her case. Then she proceeded, speaking haltingly. She had filed a report against the man who raped her for years, she began. The sound of the television set droning almost menacingly in the background will always accompany my memory of the rest of the story this girl told me that night.
She started in, giving me a rather fractured explanation of the situation. She first told me that when she was barely thirteen years old, a friend of hers invited her to meet a very kind man she knew who would let them use the pool at his hotel, a villa resort in the tourist area of the city. Her friend explained that he was a very rich man whom everybody called “El Johnny”; he owned jewelry and clothing stores as well as the villas, and he made a habit of giving the girls gifts and buying them school supplies, books, fancy clothes, and so on. So her friend introduced them, and it turned out that the man was in fact using them sexually in exchange for giving them money. Emma was jumping all over the place in the way she told me the story, skipping back and forth between different explanations in no particular order, clearly weary of having had to tell the same story to so many different people and on so many different occasions. She was visibly frightened, and at several points in the conversation she started to cry. Her entire body was shaking and she said that she no longer trusted anyone, she felt like she was about to go crazy, and she was extremely scared. I could see all the post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms in her voice, attitude, and gestures.
I tried to provide some solid support for her and help her to distance herself mentally from the story that was causing her such distress. I took her hands in mine and asked her to breathe slowly and take a sip of water. I told her my name and said that I could only imagine what she was going through, acknowledging I was aware it must have been extremely difficult. She replied that she knew I had written something in the paper about her case, she knew that I had defended her rights. She asked me why I had done such a thing without knowing her. I explained that she was a very brave girl and that I despised the manner in which some journalists had been discussing her situation. I explained how and why I thought the judgmental news coverage was utterly inappropriate and a violation of her human rights. I impressed upon her that she was not responsible for any of it.
“What happened to you was a crime, a crime committed by an adult against a minor. The law is on your side,” I said, knowing full well the weight and impact my words would carry with her. I had first heard about her case through the local media, at which point I simply did what I’m most specialized at doing and wrote an editorial analyzing the rights of sexual abuse victims. “Thousands of women survive this sort of thing and manage to be happy again,” I said, looking her straight in the eyes, “but none of them has done it alone.”
Right away, Emma began to calm down. A faint smile crossed her lips and a red flush returned to her cheeks. Just then, the intro music to Joaquín López Dóriga’s newscast started playing. She whirled around to face the television set and sat frozen, like a gazelle poised to flee from a coming attack. As the newscaster read out the headlines for the night’s top stories, we heard him announce, with that loud tone of a fascinated newscaster who is ecstatic about his scoop, that later on in the broadcast a scandalous video would be shown highlighting the confessions of a pedophile. The young girl at my side underwent another instant transformation—she began begging me to call the station and make them halt the broadcast, but I didn’t understand what she was talking about.
“You’re a journalist, please, call López Dóriga! Call him and tell him not to show the video.” Then she started repeating over and over, “They’re going to kill me, they’re going to kill me! Please, stop them.” And finally, in a fit of desperation, “You don’t know who these people are!”
And it was true, I had no idea who the ghosts were that had caused this poor girl to work herself into such a terrified fervor, so closely resembling the dread that must grip a soul upon hearing its death knell.
The news team relayed information about Succar and showed a portion of a video in which he is seen speaking not only openly but also coolly and calmly about having raped several five-year-old girls. At that very instant, a cell phone rang. We both started at the sound. Young Emma gaped at the phone in terror for a moment. Then she answered, moved the earpiece closer to me so that I could listen in, covered the mouthpiece with her hand, and whispered urgently, “It’s El Johnny’s son.”
A young man’s voice began spitting insults down the line.
“Emma, you bitch, I’m watching the news, I saw what you did to my dad, and either you drop this whole thing, or I’m going to kill you.”
He hung up, and Emma broke down again. She slumped against me, and I hugged her quietly, trying to gauge the level of danger she was in, and the level of danger those of us choosing to help her might also be in.
I asked her about Succar’s son. She told me that he never went anywhere unarmed, that he was American, that he lived in California, somewhere right outside Los Angeles, and that she was convinced he could kill her, that he was capable of that and much more.
“Why is he going to kill you?” I asked. She dove headlong into her response, talking a mile a minute about Succar Kuri’s powerful friends. Politicians with direct access to the president, congressmen, governors . . . Her words gathered pace, painting a picture of the man who was the very portrait of absolute power. Then she stopped suddenly, and I asked her about her mother. Her tone changed, and a look of sadness came over her face. She told me that her mother was an alcoholic and very poor. She lived with her stepfather—a mechanic—and neither one of them fully understood what had been going on, or even really knew the whole truth of the matter. She looked down at her hands, which she had busied by continually twisting and untwisting a scrap of wet tissue, and said that her mother was a very uneducated woman, that her mother was in fact angry but at the same time scared.
From one moment to the next, she began shaking again, saying that they were going to find her, that for all she knew, they might be listening in on her right now. She turned to me and said, “I need you to help me, because you’re a journalist; we could use your program to tell the truth. If not, they’re going to kill me. And they’re going to kill my mom, and my little sister, and me, and my cousins, because we did it, we reported them.” She went on, repeating the same sentences over and over, each time a little quieter, as though they lost some of their intensity with every repetition.
Meanwhile, López Dóriga’s program continued, still on the same topic.
I asked Emma, “Is that you in front of him?”
She nodded, her eyes welling up again as she saw her blurred face on screen.
“Make it stop, make it stop, please, talk to someone,” she sobbed, and she pressed the telephone into my hand. “Make it stop, tell them to stop it right now,” she wept.
“I don’t have the power to halt a Televisa broadcast, I have no power over it at all,” I insisted, but she continued to plead with me, so I got out my own cell phone and dialed Ernestina Macdonald, Televisa’s Cancun correspondent.
“Ernestina, do you know if they’re going to show any more videos of Emma and Succar on the news? Please, make sure they don’t show the girl’s face—it’s very dangerous!”
Ernestina replied very coldly, “No, the girl’s face won’t be shown, only the rapist’s.”
It was the first time I ever saw the video. When I heard some of the things said on it, my breath caught, bile heaved up into my throat, and my mouth went dry. I looked at the girl at my side; I couldn’t even begin to imagine how she was feeling. Her eyes were fixed on the screen, and the two of us listened in silence. She continued wringing her hands, as though trying to cleanse them of some nonexistent filth. Then I felt a hollow sensation in the pit of my stomach, and a chill ran through my body as I stole a glance at her out of the corner of my eye, wondering at the courage it must have taken for her to sit down and film her tormentor like that.
The video was recorded at the outdoor dining patio of a downtown restaurant. The sound quality is very clear, and Succar Kuri’s face can be seen as he speaks, sips at his juice, and twirls his straw around in the glass almost happily. He smiles now and again while speaking. Emma’s face as she asks him her series of questions is seen blurred only a few times. But you can hear the nervousness in her voice; it is the anxiety of a victim risking exposing herself to her aggressor in order to obtain evidence against him—in this case, a tacit confession. Near the end of the filmed portion of their conversation, she gets what she’s looking for:
SUCCAR: Lesly was coming over to my place from the age of eight to twelve. Lesly took baths with me, she was with me a long time, she slept whole weeks with me, and I never did anything to her.
EMMA: But you would kiss her, and touch her.
SUCCAR: But I’m telling you, that’s all allowed! Because that’s the risk you take when you go to some lonely old fuck’s house, it’s all part of the risk. Her parents just said, “Oh, he takes care of my daughter, he takes care of my daughter.” All that’s allowed. For instance, I say to Lesly, “Bring me a girl who’s four,” and if she says, “She’s already been fucked,” and I see if she’s been fucked already, then I see if I’m gonna stick my dick in her or not. You know this is my weakness, it’s my kink, and I know it’s a crime and it’s not allowed, but it’s so much easier this way, because a tiny little girl like that doesn’t stand a chance, because you can convince her really easily, and then you fuck her. I’ve been doing it my whole life, and sometimes they try to trick me, because they want to stay with me, because I’ve got a reputation for being a good father . . .
I was truly at a loss for what to say. It was a lot of awful information to take in. Night had fallen, and I wanted to run, to get out of there, but I tried to concentrate. My God, I thought, how many girls are there? Where are they? But it was neither the time nor the place to bring up my own worries; it was time for this girl to be heard and for me to make sure I understood the story she was telling me, so that I could help her. I took a deep breath and asked her the questions that would draw us away from the tangled emotions brought on by her harsh, violent descriptions and lead us instead to concrete pieces of information. I had to call on the whole of my training and experience as a reporter—Find the truth, find what lies beneath, don’t get sucked in, allow yourself to be moved but don’t get sucked in, I thought, trying to steady my mind.
Emma explained to me that the recorded conversation had been submitted to the state Assistant Attorney General’s Office. Assistant attorney general Miguel Ángel Pech made copies of the tape and sent them to the press, timing their distribution to coincide with his public announcement that an investigation had been launched to look into the child pornography and prostitution ring headed by the Lebanese-born businessman.
Emma and I spent two hours talking. She repeated that there were hundreds of photographs and scores of pornographic videos with her and other girls as young as five. I don’t know where I continued to draw my strength from, but I copied down the stories as she relayed them to me and did my best not to imagine the pain these poor children must have suffered—the personal anguish I was experiencing was unbearable. I tried to outline some strategies she could follow to protect herself, anything to prevent her from continuing to go over the story in all its detail, because just the thought of that inevitably drove her into a state of impossible distress. I promised her that we would do whatever she wanted.
“We need to get my little sister and the other girls back—they’ve been locked up at the DIF33 and they’re really scared,” she said.
“Why are they locked up?” I asked, surprised, as I understood public child protection services were guarding these kids.
“Because we filed our report and now they don’t want them to be with their mothers. Leidy Campos, at the Attorney General’s Office, says it’s the mothers’ fault for not taking care of them. . . . But they didn’t know anything, I swear, I swear,” she insisted, her eyes glistening and damp. “El Johnny filmed us the first time and then showed us the videos to keep us quiet. Once you were in with him, you couldn’t get out.”
Years later, it would become clear just how many girls and boys were keeping quiet because of Succar’s threats. In time I interviewed and counted two hundred children.
I asked Emma if she could spend the night there at her friend’s apartment so that she would be safe until I could take her to my office the next day, when we could figure out a plan to rescue the girls and protect their families. She said she could.
I knocked on the door to the bedroom where the woman who had called me on Emma’s behalf was waiting. She stood up, and I spoke to her quietly to assure her that everything was going to be fine. She embraced me and then asked in a whisper if I thought someone might really kill the girl. I replied that I couldn’t be sure and we would have to investigate matters further, but that she would be safe there in her home.
“She’s a good girl,” I said, “but she’s suffered a great deal.”
I left the apartment, got into my truck, and put on some jazz music. I turned the volume up as far as it would go and lost myself in the silky voice of Sade as I focused on breathing deeply, attempting to calm myself down on the drive home.
The following day, I awoke at five in the morning, drank a large glass of orange juice, and stepped out onto the balcony. The beauty of the landscape spread out there before me stood in stark contrast to the version of Cancun paradise I had discovered the night before. I rolled out my yoga mat and exercised for more than half an hour. Afterward, before getting into the bath, I recall that I gazed down at the silver-sheened mirror of the lagoon and then up to the pristine sky and thought to myself, We’ll shed light into the darkness, fearlessly. Those girls are alive, and we’re going to protect them.
I drove to the office, all the while running over in my head the different possible strategies I could present to my CIAM team. I had to keep reminding myself to concentrate on what we could do now rather than on the horror of what had already been done. Like a mountain climber who knows that she and her companions have no choice but to rappel their way down to the bottom of a chasm, I took silent stock of my emotional tools, like someone counting and bundling up safety cords, hammers, and bolts—for if one is to avoid falling into the abyss, the hardware that supports her must be secure—and I made a mental list of strategies: what people to go to, what calls to make, what favors to ask of friends, what information to share with colleagues in the event the situation turned out to be as dangerous as I feared.
Emma came into the office at ten that morning. I had outlined some ideas with my team, and we had contacted the municipal child protection service office. When I called my friend Verónica Acacio, the lawyer and activist, and explained to her what had happened, she told me this was the same extremely delicate case she had mentioned to me a few months prior. I became uneasy and tried to recall what she had told me on that earlier occasion. We never mention specific information about cases, or victims’ names, over the phone, so I decided my discussion with Verónica would have to wait. Generally speaking, CIAM and Ms. Acacio’s Protégeme organization would refer cases to one another depending on the specific area of specialization of each institution, so I never imagined that Verónica was already aware that the Attorney General’s Office had concrete leads pointing to organized crime in the Succar case. Later, she would be the one to remind me of two key names: Kamel Nacif and Emilio Gamboa.
On the afternoon of November 21, 2003, the nation’s attorney general, Rafael Macedo de la Concha, made his first public appearance in the PGR’s newly refurbished Cancun offices, and he used it to speak about the Succar case. I was sitting right in front of him. He chose his words carefully as he addressed the press, his face virtually devoid of expression:
The Federal Investigations Agency [AFI]44 and INTERPOL are working jointly to determine the whereabouts of Jean Thouma Hanna Succar Kuri, who is also the subject of an active investigation for alleged money laundering.
A murmur of incredulity rippled across the room. The journalists there had spent more than thirty days trotting out the different stories that had already come to light. They’d published photographs where the victims’ faces were clearly visible, as well as portraits of their mothers. By also showing photographs of the exteriors of the victims’ homes, neighbors would be sure to figure out who the mothers of all the victims were, and to judge them for having—allegedly—handed their daughters over to a pedophile.
Meanwhile, I called Mexico City to speak with the director of INTERPOL, having been introduced to him by a friend of mine who specializes in topics having to do with violence. I told him who I was and about the work we were doing at CIAM. Then I suggested to Emma that she tell him everything she knew, and she agreed. Straight away, we hopped on a plane to the capital city. I took Emma to INTERPOL’s offices and waited in the adjoining room while she told director Ricardo Gutiérrez who the powerful men protecting Succar Kuri were. Then she handed over all the evidence she had, and we returned to Cancun.
After a lengthy process involving various efforts and agreements with the state DIF and the PGR, Emma and her family, as well as three additional girls and boys and their families, were admitted to CIAM Cancun and began receiving protection and specialized care. Emma received outpatient psychiatric assistance. Verónica Acacio acted as her lawyer throughout the process, while we helped with the development of a security strategy. Emma asked me to assist her in getting in touch with different media outlets that could help her tell the truth of her story; we agreed that the public would be better able to appreciate the significance of the fact that Succar Kuri had been arrested in the United States if the story was publicized there, also. Several papers—including The Arizona Republic, The Dallas Morning News, and others—interviewed her and the mothers of some of the other victims. Emma’s fortitude despite the occasional, momentary losses of composure to be expected in such circumstances, as well as her tenacity and bravery, made her the object of much admiration.
After the customary four months had gone by, plans were drawn up for the families to relocate and continue receiving external therapy, in accordance with our assistance protocol. If victims spend any longer than that at the shelter, what they conceived of initially as an oasis of calm can quickly become a suffocating confinement. For the good of their psycho-emotional health, they must begin to rebuild their lives. It now fell to them—in particular to the mothers and, in those cases where they were present in their children’s lives, the fathers—to remain firm and not allow themselves to be co-opted by Succar Kuri. The PGR’s victim assistance and human rights branch had an obligation to protect them and follow up on their cases, but they never did.
Emma asked to go to Mexico City. My friend Ricardo Rocha, a journalist who had covered the Succar Kuri case on his morning news show and in Reporte 13, knew the victims and had been profoundly moved by their stories. Emma was now twenty-one years old—although she has always looked much younger than she really is—and Rocha offered her a position working in news production. And so this now bright-eyed young woman moved to the capital city, with Protégeme and Verónica Acacio agreeing to pay for her schooling. She found lodging in a fantastic apartment in the Coyoacán district with a writer who was a friend of hers, an adult who could look after her. Whenever she moved around the city, she did so by car, with a chauffeur, to shield her from Succar’s threats. This form of protection was extremely costly, but fortunately there were plenty of people dedicated body, soul, and pocketbook to the goal of preventing Succar from bringing his victims back into the fold. And the authorities were revealing even more names of individuals associated with his organized crime network.
The victims’ families continued their external therapy, but finding themselves worn down by the PGR’s endless questioning and the emotional relapses of their twelve- and thirteen-year-old children, they grew angry with the authorities. Months went by, and they were continually required to submit expert psychological and medical status reports.
One afternoon Lety, the mother of one of the girls, asked to speak with me privately. She is a sweet woman, although she has been deeply affected by her daughter’s suffering. No longer able to cope, she spoke insistently.
“We’ve spent a year in this situation—when is it going to end? This is torture.”
I relayed Ms. Acacio’s estimate that Succar’s extradition to Mexico could take between one and two years more. Years of pent-up anger finally broke through her calm, resigned exterior.
No, she said, she’d already been told that the trial could take another two years. It was absolutely impossible; neither she nor her daughter and son who had been abused at the hands of Succar and his powerful friends would be able to survive if they were forced to live with this open wound for so long. It was agony, she said, and she was right. Mrs. Lety decided to remake a life for herself and her children in a different state. She said that when Succar was brought over, they would come back for the trial. No one can possibly judge this woman without putting themselves in her shoes; she had all the right in the world to want to close that horrifying chapter of her life. The crawling pace at which the authorities were operating had become a boon to her children’s aggressors.
Slowly, while the sluggish wheels of bureaucracy were making life hellish for the victims, Succar Kuri and Kamel Nacif’s lawyers were scouring the victim assistance networks in search of the families. They made threats and offered money. Some of the families accepted, and others did not. I got involved in the investigation to such an extent that I had to fly to the US several times in order to understand the mafia links and the criminal power Kamel Nacif—Succar’s partner—had over politicians. That was the first time I saw Nacif´s criminal files for tax evasion in Nevada.
A year and a half after we at CIAM first got involved in the Succar case, new girls who had been abused by these man were still turning up at our door. Their new stories brought tales of incompetence on the part of the police investigators, stories of girls who were taken to California and never came back, of underage American girls brought to Mexico to forcibly have sex with Succar’s friends. The criminal connections were becoming clearer, but at the same time, my various sources and contacts revealed that thanks to the powerful influence of Kamel Nacif—who is a friend of Senator Miguel Angel Yunes Linares—and ex Minister of Interior Emilio Gamboa Patrón, the case had been indefinitely stalled at the PGR. Now Succar might go free, and the families with who we were still in touch were terrified at the possibility.
THE DEMONS ARE CAPTURED IN PRINT
In December 2004, reporter David Sosa, a friend of mine, got in touch with me because the publishing house Random House was looking for a journalist to tell the Succar Kuri story; I told him that I would help him, that publishing the ignominious acts of such pedophiles would be a good idea because it might help get the case moving to the federal courts. We met to go over the information I had: an index of the investigation that included hard data on money laundering, international sex trafficking, child pornography rings, several powerful politicians involved, and a couple of assassinated girls. Once he saw the details, and read aloud the names of the powerful men involved, Sosa told me that he was no longer interested in participating and that I would have to write it on my own. It was too dangerous, he said, not worth the risk.
I then traveled to Mexico City, and the publishers gave me 10,000 pesos for the book. Two airplane tickets later (for trips I took to interview my sources at the PGR and INTERPOL), and the money was gone. Three months had gone by when I gave the publishers the manuscript of The Demons of Eden: The Powers Protecting Child Pornography. I wrote it in just a few weeks, but I had been preparing the documentation for the previous two years. My husband at the time, a journalist from Guadalajara, read it before I sent it, and we discussed the risk involved. But by the time the book was ready I had already survived several death threats, an assassination attempt, and a couple of car chases with gunmen trying to scare me to stop my investigations. And deep inside me, no matter the risk, I knew it was something I had to do.
I flew to Mexico City a couple weeks before the book launch. By that time the antidrug czar Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos knew me quite well; he had to send his men to our shelter a couple of times when I had the first assassination attempt and again when hit men surrounded our office and asked me to get out or else they would launch grenades to get me to stop. At the shelter we were protecting young women victims from organized crime networks dedicated to human trafficking of girls and women for the tourism sex industry. We had also protected children abused by then-famous drug lords. He knew our work quite well, and he read my weekly newspaper columns and investigations.
Quickly I realized the book launch could become a tragic event. A couple days earlier, the editor-in-chief of Random House had been summoned to the office of the newly appointed Federal Police Bureau undersecretary Miguel Angel Yunes. The children I interviewed had accused Yunes of being one of the clients of the sexual exploitation ring. I gathered enough evidence, including child pornography videos and photos, to publish his full name. One of the federal attorneys who helped me get evidence (and who ended up receiving death threats for protecting the children) shared official documents he was sure would “evaporate” from the official files once Yunes took office.
Yunes had summoned the editors, a first for Random House Mexico, and when they politely refused to censor me, he followed up by issuing an express threat.
I called Vasconcelos and explained Yunes’s threat, and his response was immediate. He tried to convince me to stop the book launch until he could make sure I would not be murdered. “Your book has evidence that can make an important part of the federal government crumble. This is an international human trafficking network, Ms. Cacho.” I said I was not backing off, not only because my investigation was good, honest, socially pertinent, and well documented, but because I had made a promise to all the girls and boys who trusted me with their stories. He then told me the antidrug office (SEIDO, the Mexican DEA) would be guarding me at all times, and from then on I would be officially assigned four secret service agents to be with me for the rest of my life.
The night of April 15, 2005, two days after my 42nd birthday, the famous journalists Carlos Loret de Mola, Denisse Merker, and Jorge Zepeda presented the book at the Jaime Sabines Cultural Center in Mexico City. We were surrounded by a heavily armed detachment of SEIDO consisting of 15 special agents who had been ordered by the prominent antidrug office’s assistant attorney general at the time, José Luis Santiago Vasconcelos.
I looked at my editors, and they could not believe their eyes. For the first time in their life, they had to present a book while surrounded by special policemen to protect us from the Federal Police agents. A few days prior to the presentation, while the publishing house was organizing a press tour to promote the book, I was seated in the office of my editor, Ariel Rosales. At one point during our meeting, Faustino Linares, the director of Random House Mondadori at the time, stepped into the room. He was a senior editor who had recently come over from Spain to run the Mexican office, and he asked us, in his characteristically sweet, almost phlegmatic voice, “Who is this Mr. Miguel Ángel Yunes?”
Ariel and I glanced warily at each other before replying that he had been a senator, wanted to become governor of the state of Veracruz, and had been serving for the past few months as undersecretary of Federal Police.
“I see. Well, he called me; he wants me to go see him at his office today, in an hour or two hours, ideally.”
We asked Faustino to take a seat; he needed to understand who this particular political figure was and the role he played in the story of my book, which he evidently had not read.
I showed him a folder containing photocopies of some of the documentary evidence obtained during my investigations, and I warned him that Yunes was going to try to stop the book launch. And that’s precisely what happened. Faustino and Ariel went down to the offices of the Federal Security Police. In the meeting, Yunes alleged that his name should never have appeared in the book. They explained to him that I had done nothing more than transcribe the declarations officially submitted in the Succar Kuri case and the investigation on the historic links he had with a drug lord from the Gulf Cartel. At that point, Yunes read them letters from several public servants, letters that exonerated him, he said, from any responsibility in the case. Those same letters had already been published in La Jornada, when Yunes exercised his rebuttal rights after one of the daily reports alluded to the fact that his name had come up at the pedophile’s trial. After personally reading the letters out loud, he attempted to persuade Faustino and Ariel that they be read at the book presentation, as well, and that the publishing house make a statement reproaching me and saying that they did not approve of my having included the name of Miguel Ángel Yunes in one of their books. Naturally, the director refused, although he did offer to have me interview Yunes and publish his side of the story in a new edition. Under no circumstances would he ever speak to me, Yunes replied. So they suggested that he could write a piece explaining his position. This text and facsimiles of the letters he had just read to them at the meeting could appear in the appendix of the new edition. They were also willing to have the editor read Yunes’s text at the book presentation and give a summary of the contents of his letters. He said he would think about it but that the publishers needed to think about his initial proposal as well.
After the meeting, Yunes telephoned to press the issue and even sent over a messenger to ask whether they were going to accept his offer. They would not, but their counterproposal to him still stood, they replied. Faustino gave me a detailed account of the meeting, we discussed it, and we agreed—we would have to alert the authorities.
We looked at each other, and Faustino asked us out of the corner of his mouth, almost in a whisper, “Just what do they have on this Yunes guy?”
The book launch went off without a hitch, under the watchful eyes of Alejandro Góngora—the former head of the National Tourism Development Fund (FONATUR) and Emilio Gamboa’s representative in the latter’s business dealings with the Fund, as well as one of Succar Kuri’s associates. He attended the presentation in the company of a lawyer. Half of the mafiosos I had investigated were sitting there at the book launch; amongst 200 people they quietly took notes and had a man taking pictures.
Over the course of the following months, some of the roadblocks in the Succar case began to be cleared and progress slowly started up again, all thanks to the fact that journalists had chosen to present the story in the proper light and focus on what was truly important—child pornography, sex trafficking, and the dangers of Succar being set free. And all manner and ilk of new witnesses started cropping up, too. Never imagining the impact my request would end up having, I had asked the publishers to print my personal email address on the book’s back cover. Almost overnight, I began receiving hundreds of emails. At first they trickled in, just a few dozen every week or so, but I soon found myself flooded with more than one hundred per week. They came from female and male readers of all ages, some telling me how my book had prompted them to recall the abuses they themselves had suffered in childhood, others simply thanking me for telling this important story. But most importantly, I was contacted by young adults from Cancun between the ages of twenty-four and twenty-six who wished to speak with me after having read my book. I met with some of them, and what I learned was absolutely astonishing; the number of young people who knew about Succar Kuri and his obsession for young girls and boys was far larger than I had ever guessed.
Some of the individuals I spoke with had studied at the La Salle, a religious high school in Cancun, and they told me that when they read the book, they finally understood a large portion of what they had seen going on around them when they were in school. According to them, it had been common, albeit unspoken, knowledge at the school for a decade now, a well-known secret that these teenage girls and boys had zealously kept without understanding the consequences of their silence.
As the months passed, the book was no longer a hot topic in the press, but the calls and reports from readers concerned about this and other, similar cases continued unabated. I went on with my life, still working at CIAM and, with an eye to a future book, still investigating cases involving the trafficking of women and children.
Occasionally, one of the victims in the Succar case would alert us to the fact that new death threats had been made and that Succar’s lawyers had been hanging around outside the schools looking for his victims (especially the youngest girls), or outside their houses looking for their mothers, and offering to pay them between US$10,000 and US$20,000 if they agreed to accompany them to their offices to sign a document retracting their accusations. We advised the victims as best we could and reported the threats to the authorities, but nothing was done. The only outcome was that a few of the mothers—two, in particular—accepted the lawyers’ offers of money and were forced first to sign a statement admitting their retraction and then to bring their children in to testify. Their strongest motivating factor—and the most credible one, given the climate of impunity in Mexico—was that Succar was sure to be set free, and that if they didn’t cooperate, he would order that they be killed, eliminated by any means necessary.
One mid-May afternoon in 2004, Emma telephoned to say hello. To my horror, she then went on to explain that Succar had finally managed to locate her. My blood turned to ice in my veins. We had spent months doing everything we could to help her make a new, dignified life for herself, so that she could study and receive therapy, so that she could have a job that would allow her to see that money can be earned through honest work and that what Succar had taught her in her adolescence—that women and girls are only good for one thing: prostitution—is false. She told me that Succar had located an uncle of hers who lived in Mérida and had telephoned him personally from his Arizona prison. Her uncle had then called her and told her he thought she should listen to what Succar had to say.
I felt impotent listening to what Emma was telling me. I had been in a meeting with Alicia Leal, the director of the Alternativas Pacíficas de Monterrey shelter, when she called, and I let Alicia listen in. As the conversation went on, I found myself struggling to find the right words. Emma was now defending her rapist, alleging that things hadn’t really been so bad. Alicia caught my eye and whispered, “It’s the Stockholm syndrome.”
I knew how difficult it is for victims of this sort of crime to break the paradoxical bonds linking them to their aggressors, but this was too much. The girls were finally free from Succar now, thanks in part to the pressure of various human rights organizations; he had been arrested on an INTERPOL warrant on February 4, 2004, in Chandler, Arizona. Nevertheless, Emma insisted that I simply didn’t understand just how powerful Succar’s friends were.
“They’re going to kill us, Lydia. It’s better that we negotiate.”
I tossed out every argument I could think of; a sense of desperation took over and clouded my mind, and I ran out of things to say. Alicia, an expert in victim assistance, had a trip to Mexico City planned for the following days, and she offered to go and speak to Emma there. Emma agreed. But a few days later, my phone rang again—this time it was Alicia, and she sounded worried. She explained that Emma’s concept of her relationship with Succar exhibited a mixture of fear, love, and neediness. After all, there’s a reason this type of abuser likes to get his claws into these girls and boys when they’re still young, during their formative, preteen years, because that way he can manipulate his victims’ view of themselves and the world. They are able to link abuse and sex, love and fear, power and submission in their victims’ psyches, sometimes for the rest of their lives.
Several weeks later, as the summer of 2004 neared its end, Emma disappeared from Mexico City. She canceled her cell phone account, she didn’t say good-bye to a single person, and she never returned to school. We searched worriedly for her, but no one had any knowledge of her whereabouts. Meanwhile, there were other women and children who needed our help, and so life, despite everything, went on.
Ten months later, in May of 2005, I had gone home for the night and was checking my email, when a chill ran down my spine—there, right before my eyes, was an email from Emma, a scattered explanation telling me that Succar Kuri’s lawyers had taken her to Los Angeles and that she was afraid that now that he was going to be set free, they were going to kill her and all the other girls and boys. A few disconnected pieces of information and a sort of veiled apology for something she said was about to happen was all Emma wrote, but something in her email seemed off. Although the tone of her words was apparently filled with anger against me for having published the book, she also, at one point, said that it was good that I had written it, because “now Succar would not touch any more little girls.” She asked me not to look for her, because she was going to do what she had to do. Yet again she was in the eye of the storm, as a victim who longs for the rapist father figure’s love and forgiveness. She was sacrificing herself and at the same time she was back in California with the family and the luxuries she had grown accustomed to. Prostitution needs training, intense expert training to break girls into little distorted pieces and then convince them that the only way for them to feel whole again is if they are touched by the hand of the men who own them.
A few days later, during Carlos Loret de Mola’s morning newscast on Televisa, Emma appeared wearing a small crystal bead in the center of her forehead, Hindu-style, her hair permed and bleached a shade of blond identical to that of Succar’s wife. On national television, she recited a prepared speech, defending Succar Kuri and alleging that my book was full of lies. I sat next to my husband, holding hands in front of the television, frozen with incredulity, an overwhelming feeling of sadness washing over me. “This is the power of traffickers,” I said to Jorge, “they own girls as slaves, they break them and they break them until they take their human dignity away.”
“No, no, Emma, they’re going to destroy you,” I heard myself speak to the television set, as though she could hear me through the screen.
Dumbfounded, I returned to the office in a state of apprehensive expectancy, but the silent suspense didn’t last long. My colleagues in the press, all the people who had helped Emma and believed in her, began telephoning me, expressing their indignation; even those newspaper reporters who had always been so willing, through thick and thin, to give her voice and cause a platform felt betrayed. I must have gone over the scientific explanation of Stockholm syndrome and post-traumatic stress disorder twenty different times with the various people calling me. Once at the office, the team got together to hash out their impressions. The social worker assigned to Emma’s case cried as she explained that she felt overpowered by anger and sadness. There we were, Succar Kuri’s threats still hanging over us, every one of us operating under a tremendous amount of emotional strain resulting from the constant expenditure of effort required to listen to the abhorrent stories told to us by the girls Emma had brought in to us. And now this same young woman who had been given more opportunities than any of the other victims was siding with Succar.
Why is she sacrificing herself? we all asked. To protect her tormentor? For money? We stared unbelievingly, agape, at one another. Supporting and protecting victims is a calling, not just a job. Our team has always been guided by the philosophy that we work because we believe we can help to create a country free from gender violence. We are all survivors who have chosen to become teachers of peace and act as sympathetic companions who know how difficult the path of personal transformation can be. And now the question on everyone’s mind and lips: What are we going to tell the other girls?
Several of the mothers were already up in arms. Emma had sold herself out to the same abuser who—in their eyes—had destroyed the lives of so many underage girls, and they were not about to forgive her. One of these mothers went to the Attorney General’s Office and reported Emma for having forcibly taken her five-year-old daughter to Succar Kuri’s Solymar villa resort complex. The pedophile’s revenge was exacting its desired effect: It was sowing division, uncertainty, and fear among the survivors. The mobsters were strategically creating mayhem; with the victims broken down in emotional despair, it would be more difficult to keep them going until the court trial of the pedophile ring leader and his accomplices.
I found myself thinking back to that line in her email where Emma apologized to me for something she said was about to happen and thinking that this television appearance must have been what she was referring to. It would be several months before it came to light that behind Emma’s co-optation lay not only Succar Kuri but also none other than Kamel Nacif, his associate and accomplice, who had put up US$300,000 for Succar Kuri’s defense and the buying of some witnesses.
Around this same time, while Succar’s arrest was making international headlines, a young Salvadoran girl who had been sexually exploited by Succar Kuri and Kamel Nacif also disappeared. No one knew whether she was still alive or if she had been murdered. Wenceslao Cisneros, one of several lawyers over the years to have represented Succar Kuri for a time before eventually stepping down, talked to me and claimed that his former client told him that the girl would never be seen again—he had her killed. According to recorded telephone conversations, Kamel Nacif paid Succar Kuri US$2,000 to bring the girl to the Solymar Villas in Cancun so that he could “fornicate” with her.
I had been planning to spend my September 2005 vacation traveling, a much-needed trip to relax after all the pressure, the long hours, and the threats accrued over the course of this exhausting Succar Kuri case. Jorge and I had promised each other that we would discuss the case no further. I had done everything that was in my power; now it fell to the authorities to do their part. After all, the girls were still getting their therapy, a few had chosen to go home with their mothers, and the case would not be allowed to move forward—assuming it ever would—until Succar was extradited. CIAM had continued to take on dozens of similar cases; they were almost all resolved successfully, and the team had gotten the chance to share in the joy of families who were now able to go back to their lives without the shadow of violence looming over them, the joy of women who were now able to rebuild their dignity and their lives.
But my vacation was canceled one day when I was returning home from Oaxaca, where I had been filming a report on the poverty affecting women migrating from the Sierra region there. I had a fever when I boarded the plane home, and by the time we landed, I was in need of hospitalization. I spent two weeks in the hospital with acute renal complications (I had undergone surgery and lost one of my kidneys when I was eighteen years old), which led to a case of infectious pneumonia that kept me in critical condition for several more days. In the company of family, friends, and Jorge, I began to recover, somewhat weakened but on the path to health.
I was finally able to resume traveling in November of that year. I went to Spain with the Artists Against Violence Network campaign, and while I was there, the singer Cristina del Valle and I planned a concert to take place in Mexico City’s Zócalo Square in January of 2006. The concert would be part of a campaign against femicide and gender violence. It would be election season in Mexico, so part of the plan was to meet with the different presidential candidates in order to get them to commit to working against femicide and gender violence. By November, all of the candidates save one—PRI55 candidate Roberto Madrazo—had signed on. Despite this show of support, Andrés Manuel López Obrador would end up canceling at the last minute with no explanation. Madrazo would refuse to meet with us, leaving the campaign’s representatives to appear before the press accompanied by Felipe Calderón—in his first electoral act—and Patricia Mercado. Both candidates would give impassioned speeches in which they expressed their determination to combat gender violence, human trafficking, and the culture of impunity.
But all that was still to come. After planning the concert in Spain, I flew to Sri Lanka at the invitation of Amnesty International to attend the Global Summit of Women Human Rights Defenders. On December 15, I returned to Cancun, eager to put the unfortunate year behind me and with no other desire than to calmly look forward to the holiday break. But Governor Mario Marín was about to make his entrance into my life, and it would upend far more than just that Christmas.
3. Translator’s Note: Sistema Nacional para el Desarrollo Integral de la Familia, the Mexican Child protection services.
4. Translator’s Note: Agencia Federal de Investigación, Mexico’s main investigative police force, organized under the national Office of the Attorney General (PGR). It has since been replaced by the Ministerial Federal Police (PFM, Policia Federal Ministerial), with many of its former agents having been transferred to the preventive Federal Police force, the second of Mexico’s federal-level police agencies, which operates under the Secretariat of Public Security (SSP, Secretaría de Seguridad Pública).
5. Translator’s Note: Partido Revolucionario Institucional, the Institutional Revolutionary Party is one of Mexico’s three main political parties. It is a centrist-to-left-leaning party considered by many to be a state party, having held power continuously for seventy-one years, until 2000. Mexico’s current president, Enrique Peña Nieto, is a member of the PRI.