The feeling of freedom lasted only a few hours, exactly the time it took to share a meal with family and friends. In that short space of time, we went from a sense of euphoria at my having been freed to a feeling of silent anguish at the then still incipient suspicion that the powerful strings Kamel Nacif was controlling were more numerous and far-reaching than anyone could imagine. By the time the coffee was brought out, the shadow of a remand order had settled firmly over the table.
When I left the prison, I learned more about how the local lawyers who had originally taken on my case lasted only a few hours before stepping down, fearing reprisals from Marín and the Puebla state police apparatus. As a result, we were forced to start looking for a new team of lawyers, and the nightmare started up again. The judge had warned me on the Saturday I was released that I only had until Tuesday to gather all the necessary evidence if I wished to avoid being remanded. So there we were, stuck in Puebla with no criminal defense team, the evidence I needed was back at my apartment in Cancun, and a large portion of the clippings I had been storing there in a cardboard box were lost when Hurricane Wilma buffeted the city, leaving my apartment flooded for over a week along with hundreds of others in the area, before I was able to return to it. Moreover, Christmas was only a few days away, so no one was returning our calls.
Araceli leapt to my aid. She came over from Cancun, bringing as many pieces of evidence as she could get her hands on overnight, but her area of expertise is fiscal and family law, which meant we were still in need of one or two experienced criminal defense attorneys. The first such expert to agree to work with me never showed up at the court on the day of the hearing, claiming to have been afflicted with a bout of diarrhea that rendered him unable to leave the house. The person who had recommended his services later admitted to me that the lawyer had in fact spent all night going over my book and the evidence for the case and simply didn’t have the courage to tell us that he was so scared by the whole thing that he felt completely in over his head and worried sick.
We moved our “defense encampment,” as Jorge jokingly called it, to Mexico City. My brother José Ernesto, Jorge, and I waded through the entire complicated, years-long story of the Succar case that had led to my arrest. The effects of the tortures I had undergone combined with recurring attacks of adrenaline made it impossible for me to sleep. I felt as though I were locked in a race against the clock. I knew I had the evidence necessary to support what I had written in my book, and the panic caused by the thought of having to go back to prison and spending the next four years there was my most effective motivator. Finally, three days after walking out of the prison, this horrible period of uncertainty ended when we concluded that we did indeed have enough to go on for the initial defense. Araceli came to Puebla to submit the required documentation and request that I be set free on grounds of lack of evidence. There would be plenty of chances for me to break down later, but for the time being, I would have to hold myself together in order to appear in Puebla on the day the judge issued her resolution to either remand me to prison or absolve me for lack of evidence to support Kamel Nacif’s allegations.
SEIDO assistant attorney general José Luis Santiago Vasconcelos asked me to let him know what time we would be leaving for Puebla. He didn’t share any information with me but simply informed me that he would send a couple of armored vehicles for us to use on the drive to Puebla, as well as a specialized, six-man unit to accompany us. Under no circumstances were we to travel the highway alone.
Two days before Christmas, a convoy made up of myself, my family, the lawyer, and a handful of supportive friends left Mexico City for Puebla. We reached the outskirts of our destination and stopped for the night at a local hotel in order to appear bright and early at the courthouse the next morning. Jorge and I hardly slept, our arms wrapped around one another. We didn’t say much, but from time to time we spoke little words of encouragement, each assuring the other that we were going to make it through this.
In the morning, we went down to the hotel’s breakfast room, where after a few minutes we greeted the arrival of my brothers and sisters. Araceli was standing by with all of the documents, and Jorge—professional journalist and information junkie that he is—got up from the table to bring everyone copies of the day’s newspapers. We flipped through them, and I came across a full-page spread sporting a one-word headline: “Criminal.” Puebla governor Mario Marín Torres had given a statement denouncing me as a criminal, and it had been reprinted in several of the local papers. I took a sip of my coffee and spoke slowly to those gathered around the table.
“They’re going to remand me.”
My sister Sonia said that I was wrong and lovingly urged me not to be so pessimistic. But I knew this: If the governor was already daring to publicly denounce me as a criminal, long before the judge even issued a remand order, that clearly meant that this had all been orchestrated from the get-go.
In another paper, Puebla state attorney general Blanca Laura Villena declared unreservedly that if the judge failed to find me guilty, she would “see to it personally” that I be “locked away.” We stared at the array of papers spread out before us, unable to believe what we were reading. The state attorney general had made this statement with an unusually venomous attitude for one charged with safeguarding the constitutionally binding principle that “every individual is innocent until proven guilty.” You didn’t need to be a journalist to understand that Kamel Nacif had the governor and the state attorney general in his pocket, but the question, as my eldest brother asked, was, Why? What did they owe him?
We left the hotel with plenty of time to spare and drove to the courthouse outside the prison. An inordinate number of journalists were waiting for us when we arrived; we made our way toward the building in silence, and the only statement I gave as we approached was that we would all have to wait and see. I was still holding the newspaper that had printed the governor’s statement, and I brought it into the courthouse with me.
At the door, surrounded by my family and with Jorge at my side, I said, “Let’s go get the remand order.”
I needed to be prepared—I didn’t want to allow myself any room for hope. It had been four nights since my torturous highway journey had ended; I couldn’t sleep for the nightmares, but I wasn’t willing to let this pedophile’s accomplices know that. I fortified myself with thoughts of the brave girls back in Cancun who were still undergoing therapy to help them survive the horror of having been subjected to Succar Kuri’s pornographic crimes. My book is for them, for those little girls, I reminded myself silently. They’re the reason we’re here, and the various forces at play in this case are trying to silence me in order to silence them.
We walked into the courtroom, and the judge was there to greet me and my lawyer. She held her hand out to me; it was sweaty and trembling. The eyes of the media were on her, and the courtroom’s large observation window left no place for secrets to hide. I spoke to her without hesitation.
“I know that you’ll do the ethical thing—I’m innocent.”
The judge gave me an inscrutable grimace of a smile, and then rather than sentencing me herself, it was a bailiff who read out the verdict. With no further preliminaries, without even so much as glancing at me once, his eyes firmly set on the paper he was holding in his hands, he read the sentence for the ravenous media to hear.
“A remand order is issued for the crimes of defamation and libel.”
A murmur of collective gasps and groans filled the room. I felt a wave of icy energy wash over my body. The reporters and cameramen stepped aside slightly as we began to slowly file out of the courtroom. I took a single deep breath. Araceli looked at me, her eyes brimming with tears because she felt responsible; she was my lawyer and my colleague, and she thought I could count on her. She would eventually come to accept that this went far beyond any of us, that the plot had been hatched ahead of time and the only thing in our power to do was to attempt to defend ourselves in a dignified manner.
Upon exiting the courtroom, almost without thinking about what I was doing, I held the newspaper high above my head and declared for the first time that Governor Mario Marín was involved in some way with my illegal arrest and that an investigation should be made to look into what had prompted a governor to cast himself in the role of trial judge for a case ostensibly involving two private individuals—Kamel Nacif, associate and protector of the pedophile Succar Kuri, on the one hand, and myself, the journalist who had published the truth of the story as narrated by the two men’s victims, on the other.
The next day marked the beginning of an interminable whirlwind of statements and declarations that would end up lasting more than a year as many more pieces of the story came together, most of them incomprehensible for the wider public until a series of recorded telephone conversations surfaced two months later revealing that while all of this was going on, Kamel was phoning Marín and addressing him warmly as “my hero, my precious Guv’” for having granted him the favor of mobilizing the justice system to have me jailed and tortured.
We began systematically gathering copies of every newspaper, video or radio recording, and interview in which the Puebla authorities and Kamel himself were making statements against me. Among them was one particular jewel—an interview given by Kamel Nacif to Reforma, published on December 20, 2005, in which he “publicly thanks the governor” for having ensured that justice be done, because, as he himself had told Marín, “This lady is libeling me, and then boom, out comes the arrest warrant.”
Nacif would later make several attempts to retract his direct revelation of the governor’s involvement, and Marín would also submit press releases through his spokesman Valentín Meneses denying any such participation—but to little avail. The demons were on the loose. Having grown accustomed to flexing their abusive muscle, all of them—from Nacif to the governor and the state attorney general, and the head of the State Judicial Police force, to boot—predicted with a sneer of pride on their lips that “this crazy, lying journalist,” as Nacif once referred to me on the radio, wouldn’t be able to do a thing to prove the existence of the criminal collusion they had organized for the purpose of protecting Succar Kuri, the pedophile par excellence, through the intermediary actions of his right-hand man, Kamel Nacif.
I told the story of my trip to Puebla and the hours I spent in jail countless times. The state attorney general declared to TV Azteca of Puebla that my human rights had been handled in an absolutely respectful manner and that it was a shame that I had decided to make up such a story. A year later, it would be proven that I had been telling the truth.
The judge had ordered that I check in at the Puebla jail once a week. But I live in Cancun, and the jail is 930 miles away from my home. How could I afford the weekly travel costs of US$6,000 just to sign my name to a few papers? I was still continuing to search high and low for a criminal defense lawyer, and in the meantime, I was in communication with Random House, publisher of The Demons of Eden, the book that had ended up landing me in prison. The publishing house’s director told me that people were now snapping up my book left and right. But although my account of my investigations was selling well, I still hadn’t seen a cent of the royalties from it. Most authors are content to draw their advance, however little it may be, and when the royalty checks start to come in a year later, they’re never for as much as they imagined at the start. And my case was no exception. The publishers had agreed to pay for some of my legal fees, but only up to a limit, all of which amounted to an added source of stress for me, as the question plaguing me at the time was the same question that plagues millions of people who find themselves suddenly involved in court cases: Where am I going to get all the money I need?
In January, I finally succeeded in locating a lawyer who was willing to defend me. The media had managed to shed some light on the Puebla governor’s corruption and involvement in my case, and that had in turn brought the State Superior Court under scrutiny. Because the Court’s hand in my case had been revealed—and not because the latter believed the decision to be just, although in theory that should have been sufficient reason—my lawyers managed to get the trial moved to Cancun, on the argument that if a crime had indeed been committed, it would have taken place either in Mexico City, where the book was published, or in Cancun, where I had written it. On January 13, the Superior Court of Justice for the State of Puebla’s Second Criminal Court gave its ruling, ordering me not guilty on the charge of libel but upholding the defamation charge. Later I learned why: Libel consists of propagating a falsehood, while defamation means simply to cause a person’s reputation to become negatively affected, the negative transformation determined according to the opinion of a judge. And there’s no way to defend against that.
I also learned that the crime of defamation for which I was now the “likely culprit” involved several subjective elements, such as the honor and good name of Kamel Nacif, and the supposed “deceitful intent” I had demonstrated in the writing of my book. I put it to my lawyers that in the case of “the Denim King,” there was no good name to protect in the first place, much less any deceitful intent to slander him by writing the book, which I had approached as a work of investigative journalism, pure and simple, backed by a legitimate public interest to protect Succar Kuri’s victims. Moreover, it just so happens that freedom of the press and freedom of expression are constitutionally enshrined rights in Mexico and that this consideration, according to multiple theses on jurisprudence, trumps the protection of any one individual’s honor, given that honorability is a highly subjective concept. My lawyer, who made me learn and understand legal terminology despite my resistance to the idea, explained the following example to me: If a bank robber assaults a financial institution and is taken to prison and then a journalist writes about his life and the facts of his case, the thief can sue the journalist from prison for having damaged his honor, even if there is video evidence of the robbery, “because his family and friends had not previously been aware that he was a criminal.” It may seem like a bad joke, but it’s true—just as long as the thief in question is lucky enough to have an official from the Attorney General’s Office in his corner and a judge willing first to allow the accusation to stand and second to issue a remand order. This tends to happen in situations where influence peddling is involved, as it was in my case and is in the cases of thousands of others in Mexico.
We learned that the accusation had been brought before the Office of the Attorney General’s specialized electoral crime section in order to ensure that it go unnoticed, and we also discovered documents proving that the judge had refused at first to accept the case because “a crime allegedly committed in another state could not be tried in Puebla.” Nevertheless, after being pressured by the president of the Court—Guillermo Pacheco—and Hanna “Juanito” Nakad, the judge agreed, the second time around, to order my arrest. We uncovered forged signatures on the detention record and a series of other data that pointed to a seeming enigma. The idea that practically the whole of the Puebla justice system as well as the state’s governor were conspiring against me seemed absurd, and I for one refused for a time to believe it was true. But the reality of the matter turned out to be unfathomably shocking.
On February 14, the nation of Mexico awoke to a spectacular piece of news. The daily La Jornada and the renowned radio and television reporter Carmen Aristegui presented the public with a series of recorded telephone conversations in which Kamel Nacif is heard offering Governor Mario Marín a bottle of Cognac to thank him for the “smacking” I would be getting. Immediately, all the media outlets that had been giving me a voice fell to analyzing, reprinting, and studying the calls. Everything I had been saying since I left prison was now laid bare, including the plot devised between Kamel Nacif and Hanna “Juanito” Nakad, operator of the prison textile factory, to have me raped with broomstick handles and beaten while I was in jail.
Joaquín López Dóriga was unsparing during his extraordinary interview with the governor, which aired that very night, as was Carlos Loret de Mola the following morning. The story of the telephone conversations was even picked up in the United States by ABC News in Bryan Ross’s 20/20 report, by the El País newspaper in Spain, and by The New York Times and The Washington Post. Press members and pundits, especially those outside Mexico, expressed incredulity that Governor Marín should still be occupying his post after these calls came to light, and even greater disbelief that Kamel Nacif and his accomplices had been neither arrested nor even investigated by the Mexican authorities.
My case had taken a step forward, and the consequences were almost immediate: The death threats multiplied; my home telephone started ringing off the hook; the Puebla state attorney general stepped up her attacks against me in the press; and I received communications from third parties operating on the governor’s behalf and wanting to know “how much money” I would need “to let the whole thing drop.”
Every time I received any sort of threat, I turned around and informed the press, and every time Marín’s and Nacif’s teams tried to negotiate with my lawyers, I publicized their clumsy attempts to smooth things over. I got together with my lawyer and decided to file a report against Governor Marín and his entire team, Kamel Nacif, and Hanna “Juanito” Nakad for criminal association, attempted rape, influence peddling, and other crimes. My lawyer was clear in his forewarning that I had no chance whatsoever of winning the case, or even of having anyone investigate it properly.
I was not unfamiliar with the phenomenon to which he was alluding; every time the Office of the President wishes to scuttle some case, or series of cases, and silence the public’s calls for justice, it creates a new special attorney to deal with the matter. And sure enough, the office of the Special Federal Prosecutor for Crimes Against Journalists had just been inaugurated.
I knew all of that, but I thought it would be better to demonstrate with hard facts, rather than assumptions, that even when a Mexican citizen can prove her or his constitutional guarantees and human rights have been violated, the institutions of the state offer neither protection nor the right to a prompt and speedy trial. And so we would put these institutions to the test. That way, if I did end up losing my life, at least I would have done everything I possibly could to defend myself from the actions of an official state that was hell-bent on protecting such elements of criminal power. The decision to go ahead with a formal accusation is one I made in conjunction with my family and Jorge. On the day of the actual filing, for the first time in a long time, I felt happy. The agents who’d kidnapped me had told me several times that reporting them would do no good; after all, it was my word against theirs as men. But they were wrong, because in addition to my own word, we now had their bosses’ words—uttered loud and clear over the phone and captured on tape—to back me up.
A few months later, I learned that my lawyer had not submitted all the required evidence. The Quintana Roo judge was doing everything in his power to make things easier for Kamel Nacif and stymie my cause. We were unable to prove this corruption existed, however, because to chronicle the sum of subtle machinations being used to back me into a legal corner would have required that an expert sleuth spend all day, every day sniffing around the courthouse. I couldn’t do it myself—I had to work for a living, plus I had to gather evidence for my accusation against Marín, Nacif, and their accomplices, and I had to fight back the nightmares that assailed me with visions of my kidnappers coming into my apartment in the middle of the night, pressing a gun to my forehead, and saying “We told you we’d come for you if you reported us.” I was determined not to allow my tormentors to see how much I was suffering on their account. I gave interviews, and I took care to choke back the sobs that would rise up when certain questions were asked. If we took a step forward, the authorities would drag us three steps back. Evidence would go missing, and the judge was insisting that the items from the Succar case that we were submitting as evidence for our defense in the defamation case brought against me by Kamel Nacif had no bearing on this latter suit.
There were some weeks when my distress was so marked that I would wake up in the mornings unable to do anything but sit alone in my house crying. Then I would force myself to get up, do a little yoga, have some breakfast—in short, to keep going. My cell phone was constantly ringing as people from all over invited me to attend a plethora of different events; their outpourings of solidarity were inexhaustible, but so were their demands on my energy and time. I was receiving between 150 and 200 emails a day; there were people offering moral support, readers of all ages—women and men alike—expressing their indignation or sending prayers or well-wishes, invitations to attend various events and receive all manner of recognitions. People were stopping me on the street to take photos with me, to ask for my autograph, or to tell me what a big impact my book had had on them. My three-agent security detail—two men and one woman—found they now had to step up their vigilance; we couldn’t be sure whether one of these people approaching me with a smiling face might not also be carrying a gun. I never gave them leave to mistreat anyone, but there were a few occasions when some unknown individual would approach me at a public event, frantically trying to hug me, and I had to ask for my bodyguards’ help.
Amid the chaos of this new life, I fired my lawyer. In the four months since my detention, I had spent close to half a million pesos on my defense, with the aid of my publishers and the financial solidarity of people who were buying my book as a way to support my cause. Over time, I would come to spend nearly three million pesos on legal fees. Different feminist networks had taken up collections to help offset some of the cost of my defense, and they were joined by Sylvia Sánchez Alcántara—the president of the International Women’s Forum, Mexico Chapter—and all the other wonderful women belonging to this group of female business leaders. And people weren’t just making small donations and walking away; on the contrary, they remained by my side, they followed the news of the case, and they renewed their moral support every time some new problem would arise.
Without my realizing it, the image of me as a heroine had begun to swirl and take form in the minds of some. Many people came to have certain expectations about me that I myself never encouraged and that I’m quite confident I will never be able to live up to. But my country was in such need of hope that it was possible for a single brave woman standing uprightly in defense of her principles to be viewed as something exceptional. I spent my days trying to cheat fear, spurred on by the hope that I would one day be able to get my old life back. But as reporter Nino Cancun remarked to me one day at the end of a radio interview, “You’ll never go back to your old life.” And he was right.
When I was a girl, my mother used to tell me that the truth is far lighter than a lie, and that a lie will always end up collapsing under its own weight, for to cover up one falsehood, countless more are needed, and they become stacked, one upon the other, until the burden is eventually too large to bear without someone noticing that you’re carrying it. The truth, on the other hand, floats effortlessly upward for all to see.
It is abundantly clear that nobody ever warned Governor Marín of what the consequences of maintaining his fallacious stance in the face of the mounting evidence against him could be. Perhaps that’s why he and the most trusted members of his cabinet decided to pursue a strategy of implacable revenge against anyone who came out in support of my cause and against his corruption.
When I walked out of the Puebla jail on December 17, one of my closest friends was there among the group of concerned, caring people waiting to greet me: Mónica Díaz de Rivera. A Pueblaborn writer and former coordinator of the Lafragua Library at the Benemérita Universidad de Puebla (BUAP), Mónica is a well-known feminist who has dedicated her life to promoting women’s rights through her work in academia. She has earned a great deal of deserving praise since founding the Instituto Nacional de las Mujeres [National Women’s Institute] and, later, the Instituto Poblano de la Mujer [IPM; Puebla Women’s Institute]. From the very moment of this latter institution’s inception, she sat on the citizens’ council tasked with providing it with structure and a sense of purpose as it worked toward its goal of promoting equality and eliminating all forms of violence against women and girls. As a reward for her commitment, Mónica was invited by the IPM’s president to accept an official post with them, where she would be working to ensure that Puebla women truly receive the protection and assistance they need. And she did an exceptional job—until, that is, Marín ordered her termination as an act of retaliation for having hugged me upon my release from jail. Mónica knew just how far the governor’s repressive power reached, but she remained by my side regardless, allowing herself to be photographed by state attorney general Villeda’s hatchet men. Just days after I was released on bond pending trial, the president of the IPM summoned Mónica to her office. Her cheeks pale and her expression skittish, she informed Mónica bluntly that she had no choice but to demand her resignation. When asked the reason for this sudden decision, the only explanation the president—a PRI supporter—offered was, “It’s an order from above.”
Mónica was followed by some twenty individuals from various professional walks who all spoke out against the violence and injustice in my case. For a year and a half, the IPM’s work was brought to a forced standstill by the constant outflow of the employees needed to keep the organization afloat, and the consequences were suffered by all the female citizens in Puebla who were seeking support as victims of gender violence and no longer finding it.
But they were not the only ones; many are the lives that have been affected by Marín’s retributive efforts. Former senator Lucero Saldaña, who had served as president of the Senate Commission for Equality and Gender as well as president of the Bicameral Commission Against Femicide, also paid for her moral rectitude. A member of the PRI like Marín, and with a thirty-year political career to her name, Lucero was positioned to eventually take over the mayor’s office of the city of Puebla. She is an intelligent woman known for her strong political credibility and ethics, but her life changed after her appearance during my detention prevented the beating that had been planned for me from taking place. On the orders of the governor and the president of the local PRI chapter, Saldaña was blocked from appearing on the party’s closed list of candidates running for a plurinominal deputy seat.1010 Later, during the primaries for the mayoral race, sources at the PRI’s political council confirmed that Governor Marín’s orders had been clear: “Anyone supporting that journalist Cacho has no place in this state.” For having been consistent in her defense of women’s rights, Lucero found herself exiled to a state of political ostracism.
Shortly after the public circulation of the “Precious Guv’” telephone calls, the governor’s advisors had bracelets and decals made up displaying the words “I believe Marín.” I received more than a dozen emails from public servants explaining that their bosses had warned them that if they failed to stick the decals on their cars or wear the bracelets, they could expect to receive an immediate dismissal. Puebla society was fast becoming polarized. Those who didn’t previously have an opinion either way about my case decided they’d better find out more about the repressive discourse to which they were being subjected without understanding why. The Puebla media were scrambling to uncover the truth, not only because they finally had a real story on their hands but also because when Governor Marín came to power in Puebla a year prior to my arrest, he gave a stern warning in the local press regarding his determination to criminalize freedom of expression. Now the state media had the chance to show Marín in his true colors, for many of the large, national media outlets shared and supported them in their love of freedom of expression. To add to their joy, many local outlets were even managing, a year after Marín’s unwelcome announcement, to resolve their financial difficulties thanks to the millions the state government poured, and continues to pour, into their coffers to pay for a campaign to whitewash the image of the governor and that of his team.
The governor’s hard line and the extent of his desire for retribution began to border on the absurd. Low-level employees of the “Precious Guv’” set up support networks at the middle-management level of every government department, to the point that heads of schools and even universities were mounting attacks against their students’ freedom of expression. Two examples will serve to illustrate the phenomenon.
Macondo Jiménez, a model student fifteen years of age, received three days’ suspension from the Venustiano Carranza secondary school for having put two stickers—one in the school’s restroom and the other in the library—depicting a caricature of Governor Mario Marín Torres as Kamel Nacif’s accomplice. The teenage student was informed by the school’s director, Fortino Castillo Alvarado, that he had violated the Secretariat of the Interior’s anti-graffiti codes. The director had originally intended to expel the student permanently, but public outrage in the community prevented him from doing so.
A second notable case is that of the president of the Universidad de Las Américas, Puebla campus (UDLA), Pedro Ángel Palou, a writer belonging to the self-styled crack group of Mexican literature (a superb assortment of five writers who challenged an entire generation of women and men of letters). Palou had served as Secretary of Culture under former governor Melquiades Morales, and he maintained a close friendship with Mario Marín. I was invited by the students of the journalism department and the editors of the school newspaper, La Catarina, to give a conference during UDLA’s Communication Week. The students were told that “conditions were not ideal for Lydia Cacho to speak at UDLA.” When La Catrina made mention of the “Precious Guv’” and published a couple of caricatures of him, the university’s president sent in a security squad to handle the issue in full-blown police style—all of the paper’s computing equipment was taken, their electricity was cut off, their website was shut down, and the newspaper’s staff was forced to quit the premises. In the months that followed, the most renowned academics at both UDLA and BUAP were persecuted and intimidated for calling for Marín’s resignation.
Meanwhile, in a closed-door meeting held in early 2006, Governor Marín and State Attorney General Villeda, together with the former’s most trusted associates, met with two women who were long-standing PRI-party activists and knew me well. Both were women who had spent years promoting my writing in Puebla. The request put to them, according to one of the two, was a specific one: Investigate every last detail of Lydia Cacho’s life, and try to find some former friend or lover willing to talk about the journalist’s “dark side.” During the meeting, the governor’s spokesman at the time, Valentín Meneses, said that they already had taps on my telephone lines and were hoping to find out “who Lydia Cacho is working for.” The orders were to start a rumor about my (nonexistent) direct participation in candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s campaign.
“López Obrador is known,” one of the women in the meeting explained to me, “to be having an affair with a woman from Puebla; we’re supposed to start a rumor saying that his mistress is really Lydia Cacho, the journalist, and that will distance her supporters in the PAN1111 from her and at least take some of the local heat off. Plus, we can tie her to the EPR guerrilla group.”1212 The announcement to the press of my supposed ties to the guerillas was given by the state spokesman himself.
Months later, several witnesses came forward—the majority of them women—and provided me with information that would prove key to understanding the extent of the ill will borne against me by Governor Marín and his people. The former lover of one of the governor’s most trusted public servants showed me copies of faxes and reports sent by two “investigators” who had been dispatched to Cancun to follow me and install a wiretap on my home phone. As I went through these documents, I was astonished to find accounts about people with whom I had gone out to lunch or dinner at one point or another, with special attention being paid to the names of men who ought to be investigated further. (My AFI security team never acknowledged the fact that we were being followed.) My kidnappers had been staying and had spent almost two months at a hotel whose name sounded vaguely familiar to the woman who brought me all this information. “Solymar Villas,” the report read. My blood turned to ice—that was Succar Kuri’s hotel.
“But is it possible they could be so obvious?” I asked the woman.
“I don’t think so,” she said, “Nacif is helping them. It must be like a safe house for them, somewhere they won’t be found out, because they’re careful not to leave any sort of paper trail—the only thing they pay for is their meals, and they do it in cash.”
A week after this meeting, I met with my therapist to analyze the sudden return of my nightmares, and she recommended that I stop receiving any direct information about my case.
“Have all of your sources talk to your lawyer,” my therapist advised. “You can’t live with all this mounting stress—you’re going to end up in the hospital.”
I did as she suggested. I was already experiencing anxiety-related health problems. I had realized by then that all the persecution and constant uncertainty were feeding my anxiety and that if I went on as I had been, I would eventually wake up one day to find I had no other choice than to turn tail and admit defeat.
I left my session and headed home, somewhat more calm now, determined to find some emotional anchors that might keep me safely tethered to a state of inner peace. I sought refuge in books, in the sea. It was Wednesday afternoon, and I found a rock on the deserted Puerto Morelos beach, where I sat and wrote in my diary:
Now that my eyes have seen so much human misery, I search within my heart—as though it were a basket of red apples—for some piece of fresh, sweet hope. And I find it. Though I am persecuted out there, here in my soul there is peace, a peace that draws its strength from my persistence, my determination. Truth will endure, fear will pass. My strength and my power lie in my ability to accept reality and to show things as they truly are.
Little by little, a sense of tranquility returned to me. I remembered that hope cannot survive on bitterness toward what is already past—rather it must be fed by the dream of building a new future, a future free from violence, for all those who will come after us. I, too, shall pass away, but my life will not be defined by this handful of malevolent characters. My life is the people I love, it’s music, it’s literature—it’s far more than any single dark episode. My life is the luminous causes I believe in, the same causes millions of peace-loving people believe in. I would rest easy, at least for tonight.
10. Translator’s Note: The Mexican electoral system is based on a parallel voting arrangement in which senators and congressional deputies elected directly are called uninominal and those elected by proportional representation are referred to as plurinominal.
11. Translator’s Note: Partido Acción Nacional, National Action Party—one of Mexico’s three main political parties, it is a conservative-leaning, Christian democratic party.
12. Translator’s Note: Ejército Popular Revolucionario, Popular Revolutionary Army—a leftist guerrilla group operating in southern Mexico.