On the evening after the SUV I was traveling in was attacked, I paid a visit to the office of Justice Juan Silva Meza. I had requested the meeting some time previously, and, like my counterparts in the case, I had been scheduled for an audience. I rode up in the elevator, and when I reached the reception area, a man kindly showed me into a waiting room. On each of the room’s walls there were doors, and on each of the doors was written the name of one of the Supreme Court justices. I couldn’t help but imagine them seated in their offices—going over documents, making decisions, debating whether to adopt a juridical position colored by political concerns or a political position backed by juridical arguments. How do they handle all the pressure? I mused in silent wonder.
When Silva Meza read the ruling that found Marín guilty of criminal collusion, Justice Mariano Azuela had shown himself to be the perfect embodiment of that attitude of brazen defense of the governor. The Court cleared the governor in that first instance, because the investigators decided that “Mr. Governor,” having already been sworn in to public office, neither could nor should be comprehensively investigated. What was the thinking that guided that first commission? The ancestral fear of confronting state governors, who for more than seventy years have been considered untouchable? Could it represent some new form of collusion among public servants? Is it possible some of its members might have been bought off? I once again recalled the case where a Supreme Court justice was jailed after having been accused by the man now acting as my lawyer, Xavier Oléa, of accepting money in exchange for allowing the man who raped and murdered a little girl in Acapulco to walk free. Why should this time be any different? I was at a loss.
I realized that as I sat waiting, I was leaning forward, my elbows resting on my knees and the palms of my hands pressed together, like someone about to utter a prayer. An overwhelming realization came to me: The battle does not end here. Although this is the final institution of the Mexican state to which I can appeal in order to defend myself, the demons are out there, and they won’t rest until I am dead. The events of the day were a reminder of that. Will I spend the next twenty years effectively held hostage by a team of bodyguards in order to avoid being murdered? Eventually, worn down by all the threats, will I become just another emigrant violently forced out of the country? And my life, the lives and suffering of the girls and boys abused and disappeared by this network of child traffickers—will it all become just another anecdote among the millions of cases inevitably destroyed by corruption? Sadness erupted and flowed over my body, a sob rose up uncontrollably in my throat, and I closed my eyes in a useless attempt to check it.
And yet this is a daily sensation for millions of Mexican citizens. Never before had I been so keenly aware of a feeling of orphanhood from one’s country; there is no fatherland, no motherland to protect us, there is a merely a void, and in order to avoid admitting that fact to ourselves, for fear of tumbling into the abyss, millions of individuals who feel themselves to be defenseless submit to the designs of those in power, they join the ranks of the corrupt, they silence the truth.
A young man’s friendly voice broke into my thoughts.
“You may go in now.”
I took a deep breath and quickly stepped into the restroom to dry my tears and regain my composure. Once again, it was time for the public Lydia, the one who perseveres and never breaks, to spring into action, while the private Lydia felt too exhausted to go on participating in this endless game—perhaps I should call it a farce?—with the Mexican state.
Seated at his desk, Justice Silva Meza welcomed me into his office with the same warmth and politeness with which he greets everyone. In a kind, professional tone, he gave me a recap of where things stood and explained that Governor Marín would have access to the complete case file in order for his defense team to prepare their arguments.
“But this isn’t a criminal trial,” I protested naïvely. Wasn’t this supposed to be an investigation in which all parties had to submit evidence and give testimony, and then the Supreme Court would make an assessment of all the concrete facts and circumstantial evidence?
Silva Meza explained to me that, in light of the findings, the Court had decided in its plenary session to give the governor a second chance.
And if the situation had been reversed, would I, a citizen with no political power, have been given a second chance?
The justice sat silently for a few moments; then he went on to explain that it would be another few months before the Supreme Court would convene in plenary session again to vote. An old, familiar feeling ran down my spine. A picture of that drive along the highway in the presence of the Judicial Police agents flashed through my mind—all those moments I found myself feeling grateful toward my captors because they weren’t following through on their threats to kill me, the incessant, electric buzz of adrenaline when they would raise my hopes by allowing me to make a phone call before immediately snatching the telephone out of my hands, leaving me to listen helplessly to my family’s voices as they asked, “Who is it . . . ? Hello . . . ? Hello . . . ?”
I can’t do this anymore, I thought to myself, and as I looked into the justice’s eyes, I found my pupils were suddenly swimming in a salty sea of despair, farewell drops running indecorously down my cheeks. Words abandoned me; I had run out of arguments. There was nothing left to say. I took a tissue out of my purse, and I was able to slowly regain my composure.
The justice was moved, and his reaction was very respectful toward me. He did not ask me not to cry; on the contrary, he told me how he himself had once been threatened, while he was serving as a criminal court judge on a case involving a man of great police and political power.
“I was not thinking of myself, but of my son. If someone was looking to hurt me, it was possible they might do something to him. But I stayed the course, because demonstrating fidelity to one’s principles is the only way to preserve ethics, to attain justice.”
I observed him, transfixed—his gray hair, his round face, and, beneath his glasses, two eyes completely free of dissemblance. His thick hands gestured in the air as he spoke.
“I read somewhere,” he remarked, and I thought I almost detected a sparkle of mischief in his voice, “that no one is allowed to give up, because the abused girls need to be protected.”
This Supreme Court justice was quoting me! I smiled. I pictured the shining eyes of the two abused girls, who, while waiting for their psychologist to arrive for their appointment, sat coloring in my office, happily showing one another their drawings, their children’s wisdom instinctively reclaiming their right to happiness.
I stood to take my leave. The justice explained that the upper and lower chambers of Congress had already requested the case file in order to study the possibility of an impeachment.
“Let us hope that justice will be served, but you must not give up, for the country is not giving up, either.”
As I climbed back into the SUV, my security team on more heightened alert than ever, I mused on the fact that the moral outrage unleashed across the nation as a result of my case had not been enough to crack even the facade of institutional corruption in Mexico. What were needed were human beings, real people willing to transform the system and its institutions from within. But who? How many people are there who would be willing to never give in? How many would be able to stop themselves from repeating, day in and day out, that “that’s Mexico” and there’s nothing for it, and that it’s for that reason they make sure they always “take a little something for themselves”?
Just how big is this institutional monster? How are we to understand this hellhound, this Cerberus, topped—as in the Theogony of Greek mythology—with more than fifty heads and charged with blocking the exit of all those souls that have been dragged into the inferno of impunity? The heads of the Cerberus are many, but if we examine them closely, we will be better able to understand Mexico. On one of those heads we see the effigy of that large portion of society that allows itself to be perverted or led down the path of least resistance every chance it gets, thus feeding a generalized state of corruption. It is the police agent who asks for a bribe, and the driver who gives it to him; it is the person who makes a pirated copy of a film, and the person who buys it. It takes two to dance this national tango.
“Mario Marín has cost the people of Puebla more money than any other governor—184 million, to be exact,” declared federal deputy Francisco Fraile. He was referring to the public funds the “Precious Guv’” funneled through his administration’s Social Communication Office beginning on February 14, 2006, the day when the telephone conversations between him and Kamel Nacif were first made public. These funds were used to improve his public image, nothing more. But could money be all that was buying Marín his impunity? I don’t think so. In order to understand why some congressmen, or even a governor, who find themselves at the center of a public scandal in the United States or Spain or France will be pressured by members of their own party until they step down, while in Mexico such individuals are protected as if they were victims being crushed by an uncomfortable truth, we need to understand the political and social mechanisms of Mexican corruption.
A woman currently serving as a PRI-party deputy stopped me one day at the airport. Behaving like someone on the run from the KGB, she drew me quietly into a corner and explained in hushed tones that her admiration for my cause compelled her to warn me that her party was unwilling to vote in favor of impeaching Marín—although she herself would vote to impeach. To do so, she explained, would amount to opening the door to the possibility that they, who are also protected by immunity, might one day be judged for their own corrupt acts.
“They see themselves in Marín; their alliances with the business community may be moral or immoral. They support the corrupt system, and they’ve managed to float this idea around in Congress that you’ve exaggerated matters, and that women are just hysterical crybabies. You’ve become a threat to them, an omen that there are potentially millions of us women out there that might one day reveal them for who they truly are; plus, Gamboa’s told everyone you’re not a real journalist.”
Before going our separate ways, she asked me not to give up. This woman huddling in a corner to speak the truth represents the human side of things, the small acts of solidarity that can be undertaken by those who belong to the system. The other side of things, the political side that works to maintain the status quo, is something far simpler to grasp, and it rests on a combination of historically strong presidential rule, the power of state governors, the country’s economic model, and an inoperative criminal justice system.
In the past, Mexico’s governors exercised control through meta-constitutional mechanisms, a practice that was made possible by the country’s particular system of presidential rule. For more than six decades, presidents were known to make frequent use of their clout in order to resolve crises and eliminate rival groups. It would not be until Ernesto Zedillo’s administration that Mexico would witness the first failed attempt on the part of one of its presidents to “remove” an undesirable governor (the case involved Roberto Madrazo, who was accused of electoral fraud in the state of Tabasco in 1995). Prior to this episode, the case of the Aguas Blancas massacre—which ended up reaching the Supreme Court and was revealed in full thanks to the journalistic efforts of Ricardo Rocha—was eventually resolved not out of a desire for justice to be done in the face of proven crimes but on orders given by the president to the governor who had ordered the killings. History provides further evidence of this presidential authority: Luis Echeverría dismissed Armando Biebrich from his post as governor of the state of Sonora via a message left on the latter’s telephone; when Ramón Aguirre Velázquez was dubiously declared victor in the elections for the governorship of Guanajuato, Carlos Salinas removed him when the former was still governor-elect (which is how Vicente Fox’s career got its first big push, as Aguirre’s removal paved the way for Fox to be elected governor of this same state four years later); and following the moral outrage over a series of gas explosions on April 22, 1992, in Guadalajara—which were reported on by the journalists at Siglo 21—it was Salinas again who forced Jalisco governor Cosío Vidaurri to step down.
But then, in 2002, along came Vicente Fox, a PAN-party president with scant notions of how to govern. His election was a political watershed, albeit a circumstantial rather than an intentional or strategic one; it shattered the paradigm of dictatorial, all-powerful presidential rule. Previously, presidents based their decisions not on ethics but on tactics—they sought to secure the PRI’s hold on power and contain any possible social rebellions that might surface in response to the moral outrage of a Mexican society mired in a state of criminal impunity, poverty, and increasing violence. And while all of that was going on, the television was keeping public opinion distracted with soap operas and soccer.
But the country’s system of presidential rule did not limit its controlling tendencies to state governors; its area of influence extended to the masters of money and the media, as well. For instance, when Bailleres, one of the five richest men in Mexico, died, the heir to his fortune was summoned to a meeting with President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, who asked him what he planned to do with the windfall, before going on to offer him a few of his own “good ideas.” And the founder of Mexico’s most powerful television network, Emilio Azcárraga, famously known as “The Tiger,” once declared proudly, “I am a PRI soldier.” Thus the connection between media and political monopolies was kept strong, with all necessary measures being taken to tell the stories it was in the interest of the system to tell, to create and present to the public a picture of a Mexico that was conveniently false—everything calm and under control. Everything perfectly under control as the country sat and watched episodes of The Rich Also Cry and Den of Wolves.1818
The masters of Mexican political and business monopolies grew up side-by-side, like all “good” families do, and the resulting atmosphere of secrecy and pact-making fed a feeling of intimacy and created bonds of complicity among them. The country’s big businessmen did not necessarily build their fortunes on a foundation of criminal activity, but they did build them with the help of their close ties to political power and the facilities to which this privileged position gave them access. In some cases, such as that of Quintana Roo (home of Cancun and the Riviera Maya), a portion of the domestic and foreign business investments made in the state for the purposes of money laundering are backed by high degrees of structural corruption and, at times, concrete ties to organized crime.
Currently, the twenty richest families in the country not only represent a proportion of the national wealth far in excess of 10 percent of the country’s GDP, as well as controlling more than half of the value of the Mexican Stock Market, but they also enjoy a considerable amount of sway over political decisions—much more than they did during the era of strict presidential rule. Now they can buy politicians by the truckload, to the point that men like Jorge Mendoza, the head of TV Azteca, can easily become congressmen in order to look after the interests of their businesses and their party, the PRI. Their news broadcasts reflect the deals, pacts, and tendencies of their party. New times, new strategies—same results.
Numerous specialists agree that Vicente Fox headed the last PRI government. For although his office of the president belonged to a different party—the PAN—the country’s financial and tax infrastructure as well as the administrative portion of its public safety organisms were still made up of PRI figures who were familiar with the old system and amenable to the use of the same tried and true mechanisms that had been supporting their own economic, political, and judicial models for so many years.
Felipe Calderón attempted to keep the PRI in the opposition, but his fractured arrival in office forced him to return to the arms of the system’s old operators in order to secure stability and control for his presidency. The political debt he owed to the business community, together with his own personal worldview, made him a strong ally of big capital.
The system did not undergo any process of democratization; there was no gradual social transformation by which the government and society broke with the previous paradigm. It’s the same old cake, baked in the same old, circular mold, in the same old oven—the same old opaque elections. The decoration on the cake is the only thing that’s changed; now the icing’s blue, and the little plastic figurine on top is a man called Felipe, who’s been making up his notion of presidential rule as he goes along. But now that the PRI is in the opposition, their political negotiations allow the public to glimpse, better than ever before, the full power of the state bastions. In a country of 104 million inhabitants spread across thirty-two states, each governor acts as the PRI presidents once did, reproducing the same model on a smaller scale. Marín in Puebla and Ulises Ruiz in Oaxaca provide a faithful illustration of the fact that the nation lacks flexible instruments with which to unseat “undesirable” governors. Such a step would necessarily have to go through the Congress of the Union and every state legislature. Even when there are powerful legal arguments in favor of an ouster—as in the cases involving the Atenco and Oaxaca disturbances of 20061919 as well as my own case, among many others—a governor will always be able to negotiate with the state’s various parties in order to defend his post. Impeachments are not the product, therefore, of ethical debates and considerations. And such processes will of course never be initiated from within a governor’s own region, because governors like Marín are in effect holding their state legislatures hostage by placing deputies of their choosing into their congresses, thus securing total impunity for themselves during their “reign.”
The governors have countless instruments at their disposal with which to act against the wishes of their own state legislative and judicial branches, even when their party does not hold a clear majority in the state government. Take Arturo Montiel’s legal “pardon,” or the media and public relations strategy employed by Enrique Peña Nieto, the governor of the State of Mexico who has recently been thrust into the national spotlight thanks to the work of several enormous groups supporting and promoting him. Or recall, too, the millions Marín has spent on publicizing the fact that he has held more than ten meetings with President Felipe Calderón, an outlay designed to send the message that he has since been forgiven by the man who while campaigning for the presidency called for—and promised to get—the former man’s head on a stick, “for the girls and boys of Mexico.”
Never before have the governors acted with such a large degree of autonomy, and in that sense many of them have become political actors with power of their own. And Mario Marín is still one of them. For despite having lost some of his public credibility, as governor he enjoys the unconditional support of his congress, he has the ability to spend millions of pesos on publicity, and, most importantly, he is dealing with a business community that has no qualms about using his weakness to extract deals from him that favor the accrual of wealth to a handful of individuals in exchange for promising to withhold political pressure against him. Among these business leaders are the vice president of Coparmex—the Mexican Employer’s Association—and Rogelio Sierra Michelena, who tactlessly confessed to Álvaro Delgado of Proceso and to Puebla’s Quinta Columna that the “Cacho-Marín case” had in fact been useful to him and other members of the local business community in that it had made their negotiations with the Puebla governor easier. Sierra Michelena—a contractor for the Puebla government—had been an outspoken critic of Marín, but now he says he has forgiven him because “he is shaping up to be the best governor in the history of Puebla, having shown himself to be deeply regretful [for the Cacho case].” A few of Coparmex’s members have remained true to their ethical principles and hope the Supreme Court’s decision will be complied with; unfortunately, they are but needles in a haystack.
The best illustration of federal impotence in the face of the almost monopolistic power a governor can wield in his own state is the case of Oaxaca and Ulises Ruiz. Despite the overwhelming number of obviously aggravating circumstances, the federal government’s attempts to get rid of the governor kept coming up against one legal wall after another, and against the hard reality of gubernatorial autonomy itself. A governor’s power is, in theory, checked by that of two additional, separate powers, namely, the state’s legislative and judicial branches. But only in theory. In the case of Puebla, the Supreme Court’s investigation has provided us with what amounts to a clear map detailing the patterns of collusion on the part of its public servants, from Guillermo Pacheco Pulido, the chief justice of the Superior Court of Justice of the state, to the judge, the state attorney general, and some thirty others who are publicly perpetuating a lie at the behest of their boss—the governor—who in turn is at the beck and call of multimillionaire businessman Kamel Nacif. According to the recordings and hundreds of testimonies gathered throughout the course of this whole affair, Kamel Nacif has three state governors at his feet; they ask him for money, they do him favors, and they refer to him affectionately as “Pops,” “Daddy,” and “my hero.” His telephone conversations revealed his influence over one of Mexico’s most powerful politicians, Emilio Gamboa Patrón, who was referenced by the girls who had been victims of Succar Kuri’s pedophilia ring and even named by the pedophile himself as his friend and protector.
How many more politicians does Nacif have in his pocket? How many public servants, how many attorneys general, how many Public Ministry workers? Only he and those who have prostituted themselves for his money know the answer to that question. Several dozens of newspaper articles and radio programs had publicized details of Nacif’s track record—his arrest in Las Vegas, his ties to the Nevada mafia. But former president Vicente Fox still pointed to him as “a model citizen.” He had invested a small amount of money to open a factory in Chiapas—a state whose governorship was held at the time by his friend Pablo Salazar Mendiguchía (also mentioned in the recorded telephone conversations), who had come to power as the head of a coalition pacted by the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD)2020 and the PAN, among others—while the bulk of the financing came from public funds. The factory was later closed, with reports of exploitation at the plant having been investigated and denounced by national and international workers’ rights organizations alike. But the most important thing for all of these individuals is “job generation,” even if that means workers being exploited or falling ill, or environmental contamination running rampant, or millions of workers’ rights being violated. As long as their model continues to sustain itself, the social repercussions are inconsequential. The country’s growth is not fueled by ethical principles and a long-term vision for the welfare of the majority but rather by the fulfillment of the personal agendas of a mere thousand or so individuals who are controlling the rest of the country.
A Supreme Court justice remarked to the cameras in one particular plenary session that in the old days, the Court had to take its orders from the president and that things are different now. They are indeed different, it’s true. But what will we do now that there is no one tyrant who can order that justice be done in whatever manner he sees fit? Whose hand will swing the gavel and deliver fair sentences? Does anyone truly know how to exercise freedom? A handful of individuals have demonstrated that it is in fact possible, Justice Silva Meza among them, but one swallow does not a summer make. What this affair reveals is that the nation’s corrupt system is not perpetuated in a vacuum; it requires real people to feed it, to build it up, and to use their willingness to prostitute themselves to close the doors to transformation and democratization.
The final piece of the puzzle is the disfunctionality of the Mexican criminal justice system. Guillermo Zepeda Lecuona explores what he calls “the investigative victim” in his essay La investigación de los delitos y la subversion de los principios del subsistema penal en México [Criminal Investigation and the Subversion of the Principles of the Justice System in Mexico]. Criminal law, says Lecuona, has given rise to the conception of the Public Ministry as a specialized legal institution, an agency charged with investigating crimes, a body responsible for gathering evidence and representing both society and the victim/accuser in the legitimate expectations of their rights. However, because it is impossible for the Public Ministry’s workers to fully investigate all the cases assigned to them, in practice the victims are inappropriately saddled with many of the costs of their own cases. And so victims must locate evidence and even deposit it themselves on the corresponding authorities’ desks if they wish to see their cases prosper. In fact, undue, unconstitutional barriers exist for the reporting of crimes and the participation of victims in their own cases. In addition to long waiting times, it has become commonplace to see such practices as the required “corroboration” of accusations, as well as high participation costs during the prior inquiry and the trial period. It is for this reason also that victims (whose rights have been constitutionally enshrined since the year 2000) and society at large have become relegated to a position of such secondary importance as to be rendered all but invisible—their rights are not legally protected, and they do not receive sufficient support from the authorities.
The Public Ministry was created and remains to this day within the administrative sphere of the executive branch of government. And this in a country where, for decades, the office of the presidency was subject to no real checks or counterweights. The reaches of the Public Ministry’s power can be summed up in a single phrase: free discretion without effective control. The existence of this unchecked power is not accidental; it corresponds to a vision of public power in which the executive wishes to keep the investigation and prosecution of crimes—as well as the chance to impose its decisions absolutely upon judges in order to secure guilty convictions—firmly within the bounds of its sphere of authority while also retaining complete discretional powers and avoiding any external oversight. This power turned the nation’s various attorneys generals’ offices into just another node in that vast network of control that has been placed at the service of hegemonic political interests. A large part of the rationale behind the current institutional design of our criminal justice model can be found in the selective application of criminal law—in ensuring that dissidents are punished and allies are guaranteed immunity. The case described in this book is the perfect proof—the pedophilia ring, despite being made up of individuals whose full names are perfectly known, remains untouched. The only person to have gone to jail over the entire affair is Succar Kuri. The Office of the Special Prosecutor for Crimes Against Women (FEVIM) has had arrest warrants against my torturers prepared and waiting since 2007, but those warrants have been blocked by orders from above.
Millions of Mexican women and men are crushed or beated by their nation’s justice system. My case is by no means unique. I am just one among millions. But my case has been useful, because I have managed, with perseverance and a great deal of national and international backing, to stay strong while preserving two of humanity’s most precious commodities: hope and solidarity. My dear colleague Ricardo Rocha told me years ago that “no one can be a good reporter without good luck.” I was lucky enough to survive in the face of torture, first police torture and then institutional torture. I was able to follow my case as a reporter would: compiling evidence and hard data, comparing different versions of things, keeping tabs on hundreds of small and large-scale acts of corruption. I was able, together with other journalists, to take a snapshot of Mexican impunity and corruption. I was able to do all of this because my will to fight this battle is not fed by anger or spite but by the conviction that those who violate the law and human rights must be held accountable to society. I have managed to work with a warm heart and a cool head, aided in no small part by my support networks.
I am now completing my work on this book from the city of New York, where in just a few days I will receive the Courage in Journalism award from the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF). As I prepare to give my acceptance speech, I would like to reiterate that I have viewed every recognition I have been granted throughout the course of my career, and during the last two years in particular, not as a chance to boost my ego but as an opportunity to spread knowledge about the true situation of journalism in Mexico and the systematic violation of human rights by the Mexican authorities. At the same time as American and European media outlets have been giving me a platform from which to shed light on these topics, Marín has been shutting me out of the media in my own country.
My close friend, journalist Mariane Pearl, insisted a year ago that I write this book. She had written the story of her husband, Daniel Pearl, who was assassinated in Pakistan while on a newspaper assignment there.
“Don’t wait,” she told me with that sort of frank realism one only sees among journalists. “You carry the entire story within your memory, and you’re the only one. Get it out there, before the media forgets about you.”
18. Translator’s Note: Los ricos también lloran and Cuna de lobos, popular Mexican soap operas originally airing in 1979–1980 and 1986–1987, respectively.
19. Translator’s Note: Two separate episodes of particularly violent confrontations between state security forces and civilians, both involving an excessive use of police force that resulted in the deaths of protestors as well as various other documented abuses.
20. Translator’s Note: Partido de la Revolución Democrática—one of Mexico’s three main political parties, it is a leftist party created in 1989 as a breakaway movement from the PRI.