8

THE FINAL VERDICT

We weren’t sure when the Supreme Court would deliver its final verdict, so I decided to attend the Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL), the most important literary event in all of the Spanish-speaking world; I would present the original Spanish edition of this book, my fourth, on the afternoon of November 29, 2007. On the night of the 28th, my lawyers called me and said, “You should prepare yourself—the Court is convening tomorrow, and they’re going to make their final decision.”

It was to be broadcast live on television. Before going to my presentation, I met with a group of friends, authors, and journalists in the lobby of the Hilton hotel where we were staying. Fifteen of us sat there in the bar to watch the Court’s deliberations. The whole thing was like a scene out of a police drama.

With beers or tequilas in hand, perched on stools around the small, round bar tables, we sat looking up into the corner where the television set, normally switched to a sports channel, was transmitting the first images from inside the large session chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation. There were carved mahogany walls, high ceilings, and a long, U-shaped podium, also made of fine mahogany, behind which we were able to glimpse the impeccable black gowns of each of the justices, along with the Supreme Court shield and the Mexican flag at the back. My lawyer was there in the chamber alongside the governor’s seven and the human traffickers’ five. The solemnity and tension in the room were palpable even on screen. The court crier announced the order in which the justices would speak and then proceeded to explain that this was one of the most closely followed Supreme Court sessions for the media and society at large in recent memory. A colleague seated near our table was listening to the radio broadcast on his laptop and relayed to us what one journalist was saying: “Those little girls are going to win, and all of Mexico along with them; they have to win, the evidence on their side is incontrovertible. The people are watching this public session on televisions in their homes, in restaurants; this is historic.”

Then we all fell silent, the camera focused on Justice Silva Meza, and after the chief justice gave him the floor, he said:

The violation of the human rights of the journalist Lydia Cacho as a result of the concerted actions of the governor of the state of Puebla and the authorities of the State Attorney General’s Office and the Court of Justice of the same has been irrefutably established.

He then read out the names of the accused.

We let out our breath. I grabbed Jorge’s hand as tightly as I could, and he squeezed mine back; his eyes and the eyes of all of us there listening to the decision were brimming with tears. Other friends, among them Cristóbal, my editor, stood and laid their hands on my shoulders, their gazes still riveted on the television set. The huddle around us grew as more and more people filed into the lobby bar.

Slowly, each of the justices took their turn to speak, in a scene that looked like something out of a 19th-century British trial: Genaro Góngora Pimentel, José Ramón Cossío, and José de Jesús Gudiño Pelayo declared that crimes had been committed that required prosecution and that the child pornography networks I had denounced, as well as the governor, judges, and other individuals involved in my arrest, should be fully investigated. When the turns of the two female justices came around, we all froze. The first, Olga Sánchez Cordero, a blond-haired woman who adjusted her glasses repeatedly as she read her statement, began to stutter. She said that crimes had indeed been committed, but that said crimes were not very serious in nature. She contradicted herself several times, and in the end, to the utter astonishment of those watching, she exonerated the governor and his accomplices. She, the pro-feminism judge, had bowed to political pressure. Then Margarita Luna, a conservative justice with close ties to the PAN, did the same. Our sources had warned us beforehand that Governor Marín’s former lawyer, now an advisor to President Calderón, had lobbied her, pressing her to avoid provoking a breach in relations between the PAN and the PRI. None of us could speak; the only sounds in the lobby were the uncomfortable sighs of some and the slight, exhaling groans of others. The remaining PRI-aligned justices voted in the same fashion, one after the other, all couching their protection of the governor and his accomplices in pseudo-legal speak. Silence filled the bar, and I realized that every single person there was staring at the television screen. Then, here and there, people hung their heads, buried their faces in their hands, and more than one journalist began to offer up insults; everyone expressed their dismay as best they could. I knocked back my tequila in a single gulp. The mafias had gained control of the Supreme Court.

I was devastated. My friend, journalist Denise Dresser, hugged me at almost the exact moment that my cell phone began to ring.

“Lydia,” said the small voice on the other end of the line, “we lost—the judges say what happened to us was nothing. Now they’re going to kill us all.” The girl was crying softly; I tried to contain my own sob, but it was almost impossible.

“No!” I managed to reply. “We can still beat them. Succar is still in jail.”

I promised to call her and the rest of the trafficking network’s victims the following day. Reporters and correspondents, writers and poets all looked at each other, hugged one another; we were in a state of collective shock. A significant portion of the national press had written not one day earlier that this time, justice was really going to be done.

We were wrong. We repeated it over and over again, speaking dazedly, as survivors of some sudden building collapse might. Radio commentators spent the evening analyzing the Court’s decision. The public—everyone outside the PRI’s upper echelons, that is—was indignant, furious even. My telephone was ringing off the hook. In one interview after another, I dove into analyses of the legal consequences of the ruling and the importance of ensuring the well-being of young girls and boys not currently protected under our legal system.

I had no room for anger. At some point, I slipped away and went up to my room to be alone. Once there, I collapsed onto the couch; I can only remember that I was crying and that I wished my mother were alive. The desolation I felt was immense; the emptiness inside me was an absolute abyss. In my mind, I heard the echoing voice of that young girl who had been abused by the politicians and Succar. She was right—we were more unprotected now than ever. Four years after I first reported them, society was on my side, on the side of the victims, but the power of the state was on the side of those who were as corrupt as it was. I called my sister Myriam. We cried together, and she told me that it wasn’t over yet.

“Don’t break now, little sister, we’re going to win, you’ll see.”

I washed my face and composed myself. I was supposed to present my book in half an hour inside a three-hundred-seat auditorium. The whole country had heard about the Court’s verdict by now. I meditated briefly and went down with Jorge, who had been waiting to accompany me to the presentation.

“Be strong,” he told me, squeezing my hand just briefly so that I could make my entrance and go up on stage.

The room was completely full, and the lobby outside was packed, too; there were more than five hundred people in all, and giant monitors had been set up outside the auditorium to allow everyone to see the presentation. The air was thick with anxiety. I made my way in from the entrance, and the audience began to rise; they clapped and called out my name in a clamor of sadness and support. When I stepped on stage, the people applauded for nearly five minutes. This is Mexico, I thought, and the feeling that resounds here is indignation, indignation on behalf of all the girls and boys abused in silence, on behalf of all the mothers and fathers who took to the streets and marched to demand that these pedophiles being tried today receive their just punishment, that their punishment serve as an example to others. This was not applause in recognition of glory or fame. It was applause like that of my friends in the Congo, who taught me how to stand in a circle in the forest and clap together with them to ward off evil spirits, pain, and fear. With palms together and the sympathetic accompaniment of echo and air, the sound evokes the suffering of the entire tribe.

When the presentation was over, a young man about eighteen years old who had remained standing throughout the presentation took the microphone and, his voice faltering, asked a brutally honest question.

“Why go on, Lydia, now that you’ve lost at the Supreme Court? Corruption triumphed—again—and I don’t believe in anything anymore. How can we believe in Mexico?”

His question set my skin bristling; it had been only a few hours since we’d heard the verdict of the six Supreme Court justices in support of the so-called “Precious Guv’” and Kamel Nacif, the pedophile’s protector and partner. I looked the young man in the eye and told him that when I was his age, I had asked myself the same question, and that now, twenty-six years later, I knew it was worth it to keep trying. I couldn’t help but recall that when I was a girl and my mother was at university, there was only one female student for every fifty or sixty male ones. I was five years old when the Tlatelolco massacre²¹²¹ took place, and then there were the forced disappearances of the 1970s. In high school, when I chose to take woodshop instead of sewing and then an electrical wiring class instead of baking, there was only one other girl with me, and a great deal of teasing and disdain from the boys who told me that such things weren’t proper “women’s stuff” and that I “must be a lesbian.” By the time I was eighteen, I had become aware of the fact that there were just a handful of journalists in the entire country who managed to escape the government’s crushing yoke. A few—very few—refused to accept money in exchange for placing their reports and columns at the service of the powerful, putting positive spins on stories and even inserting personal messages when asked. Scarcely any editors were able to resist the temptation of an expensive gift from a politician, and many fewer still dared to refuse the Secretary of the Interior’s inevitable request for a meeting if they were known to be working on stories considered “inconvenient” for the Mexican government. And by the time I was twenty and working as a production assistant at Estudios Churubusco, I had learned that the Secretariat of the Interior made a practice of censuring important topics while at the same time turning a blind eye to the promotion of sexual exploitation and violence against women in cinema and the press.

Translator’s Note: An episode in Mexico’s Dirty War that took place ten days before the opening of the Mexico City Summer Olympics, on October 2, 1968, in which an as-yet-unconfirmed number of civilians (estimated variously at anywhere between thirty and three hundred) died at the hands of security forces near the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in the Tlatlecolco district of the nation’s capital city.

I came to understand that this hypocritical discourse was simply the voice of the patriarchy and that those who hoped to belong to the system and to move through it easily were essentially prostituting themselves by submitting to its designs. The first time I applied for a job, the head of personnel insinuated—as though it were the most natural thing in the world—that I should pay him sexual favors in exchange for a good salary. I discovered that machismo and sexism pervade every last corner of our lives and that those who do not rebel against them end up submitting to them, accepting them as the social norm, and eventually go on to propagate these values themselves.

When I was a child, single women had no access to bank loans and single mothers experienced three times more social discrimination than they do today. When I was twenty, everyone said that machismo and violence against women were “normal” and “a private matter.”

Then when I was twenty-two, a friend of mine had an illegal abortion and called me in the middle of the night, gushing blood and terrified. I took her to a hospital, where her father, who was a doctor, treated her in secret in order to save her life and prevent her from being arrested. That night, we dreamed together of a day when abortions would be legal and such large numbers of women wouldn’t have to die from them.

The first time I ever told a press director that I wanted to be a journalist and specialize in women’s rights, the man told me, “You’re better off doing society news—you’re pretty. All this rights business isn’t newsworthy.”

Before I turned thirty, I wasn’t aware that the word femicide, or a whole category of analysis called Gender Perspective, even existed. When my mother gave conferences during my teenage years, she said that universities would one day have as many female students as male, and that is the case today. Back then, there were no shelters for abused women, and nobody spoke about pedophilia at all, whether aloud or in hushed tones.

When I was nine, my mother listened to Alaíde Foppa on Radio Universidad de México, on a program that was to become the window to the world—to our world—for millions of girls and women in my generation. When I did my first radio show in Cancun, I dedicated it to Ms. Foppa. It was Alaíde who inspired me to seek out wise women, to discover Susan Sontag, Kate Millett, and the three Marías of New Portuguese Letters. At the time, we young Mexican women knew that there were millions of us who shared this vision of a different reality. We knew that a conspiracy of freedom was brewing, a collective urge to create a world where we would have a vote, a voice, and human rights.

Despite the momentary sadness brought on by the terrible news out of the Supreme Court, I knew that Mexico had in fact changed, that important aspects of Mexican life were continuing to change, and that there are just as many changes yet to come—that is why we can hope. That is why rage and anger don’t get the better of me, why I instead feel happiness at the small battles fought and won as moral and ethical triumphs, if not judicial ones. That’s why I continue to do what I do, because every time someone at an event or even simply walking down the street shouts, “Lydia, you’re not alone!”—as hundreds of people had done that night at the Book Fair—I take it as a cry of support from equals, from individuals who see in me the bravery and the voice of all people. I recognize that the exercise of freedom requires some minimum measure of bravery, because accepting the consequences of our decisions requires that we hold firm convictions and not allow ourselves to labor under illusions or act on temporary impulses.

The next day, Denise Dresser, doctor of Political Science at Princeton University, published her column in the prestigious daily Reforma:

“There are blows in life, so powerful. Blows as if from the wrath of God,” as César Vallejo wrote. Blows like the one the six Supreme Court justices just dealt the country. Wounds like the one the highest court just inflicted upon itself when it declared that violations of Lydia Cacho’s individual guarantees had either not taken place or else were not very serious. When it suggested that the last recourse to which a citizen has access can do nothing for him or her. When it transformed the suffering of the victims of pedophilia into just another story. When it made of its verdict a confabulary of corrupt governments, immoral businessmen, and organized criminals. And just as a Federal Investigations Agency (AFI) agent told Lydia Cacho when she was “lawfully kidnapped” that “You don’t have rights—you don’t have shit,” the Supreme Court has just told the people of this country the same. You and I have been left defenseless by those whose duty it is to protect our rights but who nevertheless decided it wasn’t their place to stand up for them.

In voting as it did, the majority of justices drove a knife through the heart of the Court, and it will be years before it recovers from the wound, assuming it ever does. For this resolution will come to occupy a dishonorable place in the constitutional history of Mexico, similar to the place the Dred Scott case²²²² holds in the constitutional history of the United States. In that 1856 case, the Court attempted to impose a judicial solution on a political problem; in that case, it was declared—“in accordance with the law,” just as in this case—that the institution of slavery had legal legitimacy, that Dred Scott, being a slave, had no rights, and that the Court therefore lacked jurisdiction to intercede on his behalf. Today that case is still viewed as a permanent blot, a source of collective shame, a self-inflicted wound. Here, today, the members of the Court proved themselves to be contradictory and dishonest when they threw out the case on the argument that the recorded telephone conversation between Kamel Nacif and Mario Marín has no probative value whatsoever, and when they ignored the 1,251 pages of exhaustive research that confirm the contents of that conversation. They proved themselves insensitive, or perhaps desensitized, when they chose to dismiss 377 files dealing with sexual crimes against minors. Proved themselves to be either unwilling or active accomplices when they claimed to be obeying a “higher interest” that just happens to coincide with the interests of the governor and his friends. Proved themselves to be representative of the worst kind of paternalism when they declared—in a press release that was nothing short of shameful—that their sophisticated decisions will not be “easily understood” by large portions of society.

In March of 1857, the Supreme Court of the United States, headed by Justice Roger B. Taney, declared that all individuals of black race—both slaves and free persons—were not and could never be citizens of the United States. The court also declared the Missouri Compromise of 1820 to be unconstitutional, thereby allowing slavery to continue in every territory of the country.

Justice Mariano Azuela’s downplaying of the importance of torture. Or, as Justice Aguirre asked him, “But thousands of people are tortured in this country—what is this woman complaining about? What makes her so different or so much more important that the Court should trouble itself with one individual case?”

Perhaps a violation of individual guarantees in Mexico will only ever be legally recognized once a Supreme Court justice’s wife has been transported across state lines and held for twenty-three hours without due process. When some judge’s mother is told that she will only be permitted to eat if she performs oral sex on the agents who have kidnapped her. When some magistrate’s sister has a gun shoved in her mouth and the words “So pretty, but such a little bitch. Why’d you have to mess with the boss . . . the boss is gonna end you” whispered in her ear. When some lawyer’s daughter is charged excessive bail to be released from prison, or threatened to be raped on the spot, or subjected to intimidating questioning, or a governor gives her a good “smacking.” When some politician’s daughter-in-law hears her torturers tell her, “I’ve got your medicine right here . . . a little cough syrup, you want some?” while they grope their genitals. When some state attorney general’s granddaughter is raped by a pedophile protected by a “rule of law” that serves the powerful—who almost always win. When one of them is the unfortunate victim of a rotten judicial system. But not before. Only then.

So the Supreme Court is only hurting itself, but it allows the worst blow to fall on the nation, by demonstrating just how far it is from being an aggressive, independent guarantor of constitutional rights. How far it is from understanding the systematic abuse of millions of Mexicans harassed by the judicial system and crushed by the unspeakable alliances that have been forged within the political system. Just as Kamel Nacif calls Lydia Cacho a “goddamn fucking old lady,” the majority of the members of the Supreme Court have just called you and me “goddamn fucking citizens.” They’ve sent a message that we shouldn’t bother them with such unimportant trifles as the defense of individual guarantees, because they’re too busy shoring up the interests of powerful businessmen and their allies in other branches of government.

Perhaps that is why in her book Memoir of a Scandal, Lydia Cacho writes, “I pity my country. I weep for myself and for those who have the power to change it but instead choose to perpetuate the status quo.” And we weep with you Lydia—our Lydia—but we refuse to surrender, even though six Supreme Court justices have done so. Because you’re right—Mexico is more than a handful of corrupt rulers, immoral businessmen, organized criminals, and deaf judges. Mexico belongs to those who fight doggedly, tirelessly to return some small glimmer of dignity to the country. And though the Court may refuse to assume its rightful role in this common cause, there are many citizens who share Justice Juan Silva Meza’s conviction “that there is no place for impunity in a constitutional, democratic state.”

As for the media in the state of Puebla, the majority aligned itself with the governor, with such headlines as “Lydia Cacho Annihilated” or “Marín Is Innocent: No Ties to Pedophiles.” The media were perfectly aware that such statements were lies, because the Supreme Court hadn’t been trying the governor for his ties to child sexual abuse networks but for having violated my constitutional guarantees and ordered my torture. But none of that mattered, and that night, the governor threw a dinner party at his home to celebrate. Attending as guests were the directors of most of the different media outlets and many businessmen who just weeks earlier had demanded he step down.

Alfonso Bello, a federal deputy and member of the PAN, declared publicly that it was a disgrace that President Felipe Calderón, a member of his own party, had negotiated with Mario Marín to help the latter escape justice. Nothing but silence followed his statement. Not a single PAN member seconded him.

POLICE FOR TRUTH

One February morning in 2008, I arrived for an appointment with a doctor specialized in treating the physiological effects of torture. The PGR had already run tests looking into the psychological effects of the abuse I had undergone, but my activist friends had been urging me for months to see one of these specialists. I finally agreed to have an appointment with one, Dr. Velks. I came armed with all the various blood tests she required I have done before my first visit. When I walked in, she said it was an honor to meet me and that she had been following the news of my case closely.

Calmly seated opposite her at the desk, I observed how her face took on a look of circumspection. She picked up a pen and began taking notes. I told her that I felt good, that I’d woken up that morning with more energy than before and wasn’t having headaches anymore. After a few minutes, she set her papers down on the desk and looked at me; she asked me to lie back on the table. She began her physical examination, continuing her questions as she did.

“How did you get here?” she asked, looking me in the eye with what appeared to me to be a flicker of compassion.

“I drove here, with my bodyguard—”

“No. What I mean is that it makes absolutely no sense that you look so well. Let me put it to you this way: If you were a car, you wouldn’t be able to start your engine. Your whole system is out of whack; it’s as if your body is short-circuiting, and yet you still haven’t stopped to correct your health problems. Your blood pressure is extremely low. Your blood sugar is so high you’re at risk for pre-diabetes. You have inflammation in your liver and bladder. Your blood work shows that you’re suffering from anemia. And all your hepatic indicators are off.”

The doctor, who specializes in gynecology, had spent years treating women who were victims of sexual abuse, and she had grown deeply knowledgeable of the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). I was familiar with the symptoms; after all, I myself had specialized in aiding victims of extreme violence at the women’s shelter. The only response I could muster was that the Attorney General’s Office had given me a PTSD test and it had come back positive. Our eyes met and we held each other’s gaze for a moment—I, seated on the examination table, wearing my little hospital gown; she, standing in front of me, dressed in white.

“Listen, Lydia,” she said seriously, “if you go on like this, you’re going to end up in the hospital. If you want to protect the girls, you have to protect yourself first.”

The doctor took my hand. This small physical contact was enough to break down the wall of emotional protection that had been working so well for me the past several years. I began to sob uncontrollably, like a lost little girl. She set a box of tissues at my side and continued her explanations while I let it all out.

“You know that when a person is tortured, the first thing that happens is that the suprarenal glands release large quantities of epinephrine or adrenaline. Epinephrine is the flight hormone—it sends a supercharge of energy to the muscles and increases the heart rate to keep the mind and body alert and able to flee when there’s a dangerous situation. But if your brain realizes that you’re not going to be able to flee, and if you’re still being attacked or threatened, which is what’s happening in your case, then your body says, ‘We’d better stay alert so that we can continue to withstand all this stress, this stress that’s not going to disappear because it’s not being given any other outlet.’ Once this message has been sent, your body begins to secrete mainly hydrocortisone, or cortisol.

“Cortisol is a hormone associated with stress, and its levels in the blood can become elevated—in your case, due to the aggressions you have experienced, as well as all the fear and pressure. Meanwhile, your immune system becomes depressed. Cortisol is an anti-stress hormone, but when it’s present in excessive amounts, it favors the overproduction of insulin. If you don’t take it seriously, you could very quickly find yourself developing hyperinsulinemia, a rise in the body’s resistance to insulin. This leads to neuron death, it compromises your immune system, and it weakens your power of memory. And in your case, since you’re starting out with just the one kidney, you could end up requiring intensive care.”

She went on with her examinations, discovered several lumps that needed to be looked at, and arranged to call me once the results were in.

I fumbled around for my purse. That’s where I keep the small Moleskine notebook I write everything down in. . . . It was true—in the last several months, I’d begun feeling more anxious about not being able to remember things.

My memory is starting to fail, I thought to myself. I felt a ripple of fear as it dawned on me that my body might fail me, that my mind might fail me, too. But the fight wouldn’t stop; I couldn’t stop.

I pulled out my notebook and set about writing down everything the doctor had just told me. At the same time, I appealed to her, saying that years and years spent following a regimen of meditation and yoga ought to have done something to help me. She said she was convinced that had I not been so conscientious about managing my stress, I would most surely have already been hospitalized by now. I pleaded with her to throw me a lifeline, something to keep me afloat, and she replied that only I could save myself. She wrote out a series of prescriptions, outlined some dietary changes, recommended various vitamin supplements, and admonished that I had to decide for myself if I was willing to place my health above my social battles; only I could make this determination.

I left the doctor’s office and headed home. I was genuinely scared. I regretted not having asked my sister to come with me to the appointment. While I was picking up my prescriptions at the pharmacy, my phone rang. I could hear a deep voice, raspy now from years of chain-smoking, coming down the line. It was my lawyer.

“Lydia, congratulations. They’ve put out an arrest warrant.”

“On who? The governor, Kamel . . .?”

“No. On Montaño and Pérez, the cops who tortured and tried to kill you. The Public Ministry ruled that they’re responsible for the crime of torturing you. They just issued the warrant and they’re sending the file to Cancun. It’ll go to a federal judge, and we’ve got a good chance of beating them. We’ll be asking for the maximum sentence.”

“And if they’re arrested, do you think they’ll make a deal to get out of going to jail in exchange for telling the truth about how Kamel Nacif, the state attorney general, and the governor gave the order?”

“Maybe. So far everything is lining up in our favor.”

I got home. Jorge was there, writing something up for the paper. He asked me how it had gone at the doctor’s, and I, as I always do, put what was most immediate above what was most important. I told him about the ruling. He got up to hug me, and I broke down in tears. My sobs were a mixture of emotions—on the one hand, I was happy at having received this good news, and on the other, I was frightened by my diagnosis. But I didn’t want to trouble him with more problems.

We sat down to run through all the scenarios and possible outcomes. Right then, a messenger arrived from my lawyer’s office with a copy of the most recent updates to my case file. I signed for it and began to read aloud. We had managed to get the arrest warrants issued for the two agents thanks in large part to the voices of their colleagues—the honest policewomen and men who, unlikely though it may at times seem, really do exist.

One factor had been the fact that my federal-issue bodyguards, during questioning by the Attorney General’s Office, stated that the police had in fact blocked off the street in order to arrest me and that they had believed, given the style of operation they were witnessing, that it might be a kidnapping; that while they were being held at the corner, they could hear that the police agents who hurt me with their guns had told everyone to freeze; that there were multiple cars securing the entrance and exit to the block; that there were several armed men in street clothes and unmarked vehicles; and that at no point was I shown an arrest warrant. But the declaration of a police officer from Cancun who participated in the operation was also key. He stated that my description of what had happened was accurate and truthful; that his superiors had instructed them to arrest me “extra-legally”; and that there had been additional armed men—“informers”—waiting in a white SUV. His declaration came on top of that made by Víctor Mendo Sánchez, an AFI agent in Puebla, who testified to the Attorney General’s Office that he had received orders directly from the Puebla state attorney general to “fuck Lydia Cacho up, you know—beat her up or kill her.” He explained that he was given these instructions a few days prior to my detention, although he did not number among those agents finally chosen for the operation.

The good mood brought on by this news didn’t last. On May 6, nearly four months after the arrest warrant had been issued, the judge ruled that while there were indeed factors proving that a crime of torture had been committed, he was unable to sentence the two agents, who had not been arrested because the police had not managed to locate them (according to witnesses, they were still in Puebla). The judge stated that the law against police torture applied only to agents in the state of Quintana Roo and that these two agents must, therefore, be tried in Puebla itself. And so, availing himself of complicated, contradictory, and incomprehensible legal jargon, the judge washed his hands of the hottest case of the day.

Exhausted, I accompanied my lawyer, one of CIAM’s legal representatives, to the courthouse in Cancun. There, we appealed the judge’s decision and learned that everything had already been arranged—the federal judge was going to refer the case to a local judge (local judges are more easily manipulated, bought, and threatened). Later, as we were leaving, we were approached by a prosecutor, who asked us to meet with him, discreetly, on the corner of the street that runs outside the courthouse. Once we had all gathered there, the prosecutor informed us that the governor of Quintana Roo was moving to prevent the two Judicial Police agents from being sentenced.

“Don’t let them transfer the case to Puebla,” he told us, speaking under his breath. “They want to move it there to make the whole thing inadmissible and get it thrown out. They want to send you into the lion’s den.”

I asked him how he knew. He told me that he had been there when Kamel Nacif’s lawyers and a high-ranking state official came to speak with the judge and enlighten him to the fact that the chief justice of the Superior Court of Justice of the state of Quintana Roo supported the governor’s recommendation to shut down my case.

And that’s precisely what happened. Despite eight months of effort—during which we presented additional evidence, investigated the different government officials involved, and publicly denounced the corruption in the court and the governor’s hand in it all—on January 8, 2009, just as we had suspected, the state Superior Court threw out the torture case. Two days later, according to the information given to me by the assistant to the state Secretary of the Interior of my own state, the governor of Puebla called the governor of Quintana Roo to thank him for his help. The scandal had been hurting his party. After all, the PRI needed to maintain a united front—the elections were coming up, not to mention the reelection of the chief justice of the state Superior Court itself. Lizbeth Song, the chief justice of the Court at the time, was seeking reelection, and the governor had her in his pocket. Politics had trounced justice once again.

As it happens, by the time I learned the outcome of the case, my priorities were focused elsewhere. Back in December, I had paid visits to several doctors and one oncologist and had undergone surgery to remove my uterus and ovaries. The doctors all agreed that the dramatic hormonal changes I had experienced, together with other health problems resulting from the stress I had been subjected to, were factors that had contributed significantly to the growth of tumors in those organs. I had lost a great deal of weight and wasn’t feeling capable of withstanding any new physical or emotional pain, but the surgery wasn’t optional. I agreed to it, but not without first sitting down with my doctor, members of my family, and my personal security advisors. Over the course of the previous months, I had received threatening phone calls. We knew that they were from the Judicial Police agents who, anxious over the judge’s impending sentence, wanted to see me dead rather than alive, or, at the very least, scared and upset.

My lawyer came to Cancun. An hour before I went in with my doctor to go over the details of the surgery, he told me in no uncertain terms that my life was in greater danger than ever.

“The governors, Nacif, and the judge are all maneuvering, but we filed an appeal to bring back the case against the two agents; if we win the appeal, they’ll sing, and then we can really go after them all again.”

My security advisor nodded. We met with the doctor, who’d brought in an anesthesiologist she knew and trusted, and we decided that I should be admitted under an alias. No one in the hospital would know my real name. I would receive no visitors outside my immediate family. And we followed the plan to the letter.

Then another wake-up call courtesy of my body: The removal of my ovaries had triggered a premature menopause. The endocrinologist who analyzed my test results cautioned me that I couldn’t go on with business as usual if my stress indicators remained at such high levels. This sudden-onset menopause, a side effect of my surgery, was forcing my suprarenal glands to work twice as hard as usual to keep my hormone system in balance. If my body continued producing elevated levels of cortisol, anything might happen to me. I underwent the requisite medical treatments and followed all of my doctors’ recommendations, save one—I was not willing to give up the case. Not until Jean Succar Kuri was convicted for child pornography. Otherwise, his vengeance against the girls who had spoken out against him would be brutal, merciless.

In May of 2009, Darío Ramírez, director of the Mexico chapter of ARTICLE 19, a London-headquartered organization dedicated to the protection of freedom of expression, approached me and offered to have his legal team take over my case. I accepted his proposal not only because they are specialists in human rights and freedom of expression, but because they are well versed in international litigation. They had studied the scope of the corruption surrounding my case and were prepared to do battle. Because they are a nongovernmental organization, their services would be offered free of charge. I would finally be able to stop struggling to put together the exorbitant sums required to mount a proper defense; the financial hardship had taken a brutal toll.

Mario, Cyntia, and Iván, three young experts, picked apart my case. Slowly but surely, from among thousands and thousands of sheets of paper all packed away in cardboard boxes, they were able to uncover information and piece together an increasingly clear picture of how files had been raided, evidence tossed out, and backroom judicial machinations concocted in an effort to prevent my case from succeeding, as well as who had been involved. I felt more confident than ever. This group of young women and men clearly belong to a new generation of trial attorneys who live and breathe human rights issues and have a deep understanding of the patterns of gender violence. They also took up the defense of a new civil suit brought against me by Kamel Nacif. He had managed to rope in a victim named Edith, who was among those to originally report him and who later accepted money in exchange for assisting him in his efforts to discredit me. There was a recording of Nacif saying, “We’re going to sue her over and over again, until the bitch begs forgiveness.” His lawyers used legal technicalities and loopholes to argue that because I do not hold a degree in journalism, I am not in fact a journalist. They also argued that my book The Demons of Eden exposed his personal, private affairs and that the publishers and I should therefore pay millions of pesos for the copyright and for having published a photo of Edith in Los Angeles with Succar’s children (whose faces had been blacked out), in addition to either removing the book from the shelves or, alternately, putting out a new edition that would incorporate any changes they saw fit to include. In essence, this amounted to a claim that the rape of young girls and boys and the production of child pornography are “private issues.” The absurdity of such an idea is beyond compare.

It was obvious that the goal of their strategy was to wear me down emotionally and financially. The trial was held in Mexico City, and I was living in Cancun; I would have to make frequent trips to the capital in order to participate in my defense. A group of the country’s most renowned journalists had to testify before the Court to the effect that I am indeed a journalist. I submitted copies of more than two thousand articles of mine that had been published prior to my arrest, as well as countless journalism awards I have received over the length of my career.

On November 13, 2008, I got a telephone call from my dear friend, the lawyer and activist Chihuahua Lucha Castro. She greeted me warmly, asking how I was and if I had been taking care of myself, and after I told her that I had, her voice began to crack.

“Armando Rodríguez Carreón, the reporter at El Diario, has been shot to death,” she told me.

My smile dissolved instantly and a hot flash overwhelmed me; I knew that Armando had received two death threats, sent via text message to his cell phone. He was a very well known journalist, somewhat shy with women, and thoughtful with his friends. I first met him when I was in Juarez covering a protest against the murders of several women there. And I had crossed paths with him on plenty of other occasions when traveling to Chihuahua to speak with fellow journalists. I was at a loss for words; I thought about his daughters and his newborn child, about his wife. About his colleagues, who, as I see it, are an outstandingly brave bunch. Every one of them. I imagined the grief they must be feeling. I couldn’t sleep that night.

Some days later, my therapist explained to me, “It’s survivor guilt, Lydia. It’s very difficult, emotionally, to understand why other people have been killed and you haven’t. It may seem like something silly, but it’s not. You feel guilty for having survived, and you eat yourself up because you can’t help them. It’s not in your hands—there’s nothing more you can do; you can barely manage with your own case.”

I decided that same day that I would dedicate part of my time to sharing information about personal security tactics and strategies to combat stress—all the valuable experience I have picked up over the years—with my fellow journalists. For now, that’s the only thing I can offer all these colleagues of mine who, like myself, are living in a state of constant uncertainty and doing everything they can to come to terms with danger, to find ways to live with it, in order to continue with their lives and work.

On May 31, 2010, a group of police agents carrying exclusive-military-use assault rifles attacked our women’s shelter. A municipal police agent confronted our security guard over the intercom, demanding that we hand over his wife and son. He claimed that we had kidnapped the two of them and were holding them against their will. Our security team went on red alert and moved into action instantly. His wife was indeed at the shelter—he had tried to shoot her to death and had abused the baby boy. He had made use of police equipment to track the woman, with help from the State Attorney General’s Office. As always, the CIAM team was up to the challenge. We made video recordings of everything: the unit members’ badge numbers, the attack on the gate, and the arrival of additional armed, hooded officers to assist in the task of trying to kick down the doors.

Eventually, the abusive husband snarled at the guard on the other side of the door, “Tell that Lydia Cacho that I’m going to report her for kidnapping and that her days are numbered.”

We were able to get the federal police to come to our aid. But to our surprise, the commander merely showed up, took a look around, and left, explaining to his superiors that the men had hoods and assault weapons and that although some of them were wearing police uniforms, he thought they might be members of the Zetas or some drug cartel. After the shelter had been under siege for several hours, the state attorney general finally ordered the police to fall back. We documented everything, and ARTICLE 19, the Committee for the Protection of Journalists (CPJ), Amnesty International, and other organizations put out a worldwide alert. The response from our governor was that the country was currently in a very difficult situation and the drug cartels had infiltrated the police. He recommended that we close down the shelter; he could not guarantee our safety or our lives, or those of the women and children in our shelter, who had already been victims of extreme violence.

Following several months of legal actions, the police agent who had attempted to break into the shelter was sanctioned to one week’s unpaid suspension. Months later, Quintana Roo state attorney general Gaspar Armando García Torres admitted in the media that 70 percent of Cancun’s municipal police force had been infiltrated by the drug cartels. We spoke out publicly, hoping to at least make the attacks that were likely to come more costly to them. The forty-three-woman, one-man CIAM team spent two months on red alert, day and night, implementing safety and security precautions at every step along the way. In addition to the usual assortment of aggressors, the strong arm of the police had now become our publicly sworn enemy.

We held a risk assessment meeting with a group of experts who had worked with threatened individuals in Colombia. President Calderón’s false war on drugs had weakened the social fabric of Mexico’s communities; victims of domestic abuse in a majority of areas in the country were no longer able to find help. What with all the kidnappings, death threats, and infiltrations, many nongovernmental organizations were no longer willing to assist victims of organized crime, whose numbers were growing daily. So it was that our shelter, almost overnight, became one of the few safe places left in the country. We were giving refuge to victims of the big cartel bosses, victims of human trafficking, and even to the wife of a pilot who flew for the cartels. She gave the federal authorities all the information she had, but her narcotrafficking husband was never arrested, despite the fact that she had even provided aircraft registration numbers for the planes being used to transport drugs from Cancun to Monterrey and Durango. Additionally, SEIDO was provided with the addresses and telephone numbers of his accomplices. We discovered firsthand which cartels were being protected by Calderón’s administration and which were under the protection of the state of Quintana Roo. Like the rest of the country, we found ourselves besieged, surrounded by unprecedented levels of violence whose only aim was to spread chaos and terror and to encourage a repressive police state and the curtailing of freedom and rights. It was a war against legality, not a struggle to impose the rule of law.

Likewise, the hypocrisy of the American government had left us exceedingly vulnerable. Hillary Clinton had just concluded a visit to Mexico in which she had promoted the opening of new shelters for victims of human trafficking. And yet no one—not the Obama administration, not the Zapatero administration in Spain, and not any of the other countries supporting and vaunting this ridiculous “war on crime”—were willing to grant humanitarian visas to the victims who had taken the witness stand to give their testimony in cases of atrocious crimes and who were consequently being hunted down by criminals, or at times even tracked down by the state, and killed. Not even human rights advocates or journalists whose family members had been murdered received humanitarian visas. These victims were not the only ones affected; the situation extended so far as to include journalists and human rights advocates from the northern part of the country, who were forced to flee for their lives and begin an existence of odious exile, treated as undocumented, immigrant outcasts by the same governments that were praising Calderón’s war.

In the space of four years, there have been three hundred thousand forced disappearances—men, women, and children whose whereabouts and fates are unknown. More than twenty thousand people killed in gunfights with merciless assassins. Thousands of citizens kidnapped. We resisted this chaos; our desire was to continue defending life, to continue defending the right to build a real justice system for our country. We decided, amid the endless exhaustion and sweat, to try to find a way to counteract the violent, warlike clamor that had begun to work its way into the public discourse. We chose not to surrender in the face of the anger this useless war awakens. To educate in the ways of peace, that was the answer.

NOT WITH MY CHILD!

I had come to an important decision: If I had to spend my time constantly moving from one place to another, I might as well break my self-reinforcing cycle of anxiety and turn all those trips into something positive and useful. I got myself more organized and began giving conferences and workshops on the topics of journalism and aiding victims of violence. I visited some ten American universities—first New York University and Columbia, then Stanford, the University of Southern California, and the University of Utah, to name a few—and had the honor of receiving the Wallenberg Medal from the University of Michigan, where my adopted daughter studied. After speaking with fathers and mothers and receiving hundreds of letters from parents desperate for guidance on what to do in cases of abuse, I decided to write a manual for the prevention and treatment of child sexual abuse. I had interviewed plenty of experts over the years, as well as having been involved in legal proceedings for hundreds of different victims. I was more than prepared for the task. It would be the best response I could give the teachers, doctors, nurses, and parents who were constantly asking me, What should I do if a girl or boy I know has been abused? So I rolled up my sleeves and got down to work, and in late 2009, I published Not with My Child: A Manual for the Prevention, Understanding, and Treatment of Child Sexual Abuse. The book became a bestseller, and my publisher and I sat down and decided to put out a very cheap edition, almost at cost, so that teachers throughout Latin America could have easy access to it, ordering off my website. The book turned out to be a blessing for me; with the proceeds from the sales, I was able to pay my overdue legal fees to the lawyers who had worked on my case, and even to set aside an emergency fund. Because, despite what the skeptics may think, if I am alive today, it is because I’ve been making and following security strategies for years, because I take the threats against me seriously, and because I have on more than a few occasions left my home, my state, and even my country in order to avoid an imminent attack. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the deaths of my colleagues, it is that threats can give way to actual acts of violence in very specific, concrete moments and that what we must do is remove ourselves from those extremely precise moments when everything comes together to make an attack a reality.

In January 2010, the four brave Supreme Court justices who had voted to demand an investigation into child exploitation networks and Governor Marín’s role in them surprised the nation. They announced the publication of a book, The Ways of Power: The Lydia Cacho Case (Porrúa). Everything about the book is symbolic; the cover even displays a photograph of a mural, located inside the courthouse itself, entitled “Rape,” by the artist Rafael Cauduro. The painting shows a woman tied to a chair, at the mercy of four men who are torturing her.

Justices Genaro Góngora Pimentel, José Ramón Cossío, José de Jesús Gudiño Pelayo, and Juan Silva Meza are completely convinced that “the journalist’s fundamental rights were seriously violated.” But even more significant is the fact that, after laying out their juridical analyses of the case, they attest that “the authorities under indictment are protecting and promoting pedophilia and child pornography networks.” The entire book is surprising, not only because of the clarity of each of the justice’s arguments but because its mere existence is indicative of a paradox. Four members of the highest court in the land have been forced, in their own words, to write a book in order to defend freedom of expression, to give voice to the victims of crime, and to protect the Supreme Court’s investigative power, outlined in Article 97 of the Constitution, which allows it to settle issues in cases where high-ranking government officials have abused their power to the detriment of the country’s citizenry.

This is extremely significant because, as these justices themselves admit, the country’s most powerful forces took my case as an opportunity to mobilize against the Supreme Court, to weaken it, and, according to them, some of these same forces attempted to avail themselves of legal technicalities and use “the Puebla/Cacho Case” as a way to shrink the Court’s investigative power so that in the future, a normal citizen such as myself or anyone else would be unable to turn to the Supreme Court after all other bids for justice had operated in favor of the powers that be. I was jailed and persecuted for writing a book, and several years later, the most upstanding members of the Mexican Supreme Court had found themselves forced to publish another book in order to inform society about what the majority of the justices, in a politically motivated decision, wished to hide about the justice system’s inner workings.

At the time when the book you are reading was published, the justices’ tome had inspired sixteen law school theses and become all but required reading for the master’s degree in human rights and jurisprudence in Mexico.

SLAVERY, INC.

On June 9, 2010, I presented the first edition of my book Slavery, Inc., (Esclavas del poder) in Spain. I had spent five years researching it. I decided to use the time between different trials to follow the trail of the large-scale human-trafficking mafias known for dealing in women and children. I had enough evidence to prove that as a result of the inefficacy of the Mexican judicial system and the consequentially high level of impunity in the country, drug cartels were throwing themselves wholeheartedly into the business of sexual slavery, exploiting children, teenagers, and adults alike. The support I received from non-governmental organizations the world over, from central Asia to the United States and Argentina, was inspiring. I discovered thousands of people doing highly effective work against human trafficking and child pornography, as well as journalists from a variety of countries who were unwilling to stop at writing a mere press release or report—famous columnists like Nicholas Kristoff, who is normally known for covering wars but who, upon learning of the magnitude of these human-trafficking operations, decided to get involved, as a citizen of the world. As a result, there was increased promotion for campaigns such as CNN Heroes and organizations such as Free the Slaves, another called Not for Sale, created by American ex-banker Dave Batstone, and that headed by my dear friend Rushira Gupta, the coordinator of an immensely large project aimed at combating the sexual exploitation of girls in India. My investigative work made me feel stronger than ever, and the risk was worth the effort—the combined efforts of thousands were breaking down walls designed to encourage silence and obfuscation regarding the functioning of slavery in the 21st century.

Meanwhile, in August 2010, I returned to Spain at the invitation of Bibiana Aído, Minister of Equality, to be named as an international ambassador for the United Nations’ Blue Heart Campaign against sex trafficking. I was sworn in by members of the Spanish government and Antonio María Costa, executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNDOC). We were joined by two other goodwill ambassadors, the actresses Mira Sorvino and Belén Rueda.

Following the formal swearing-in session, an expert in Spanish cyber-policing approached me and said that he had read The Demons of Eden, that it was his go-to book for understanding a large number of issues surrounding child abuse and how pedophiles operate. He pulled the book from his briefcase—it was absolutely covered in highlighting, underlining, and all manner of markings and notes. A sob choked my throat, and I felt a warm wave welling up behind my eyes. I signed his book and felt deeply honored.

I was completely worn out but glad to see the large number of countries that were bringing the issue of human trafficking to light, and at the same time, I was able to witness how the media is slowly changing its discourse regarding prostitution and sexual violence. Many journalists have learned to differentiate between human trafficking and prostitution, and to not discriminate against women working in the sex industry. There’s a long way to go yet, but achievements have been made.

It became clear almost overnight that the many steps being taken were finally leading forward, and several of the more-developed countries were beginning to admit that they, too, bore a share of the responsibility for the global exploitation of slaves. Flying back from Spain, I felt unequivocally privileged to be living in this of all centuries, and privileged to have the strength required to face the challenges that my profession and my convictions bring me into contact with. What I do is of service, and taken together with the work of thousands of people throughout the world, its transformative power is even greater, I thought to myself. I leaned back in my seat, smiled, and sipped my water. I was happy, simply and completely happy.

A few months afterward, on December 6, 2010, our daughter, Clara, gave birth to a baby. When I finally got the chance to hold this beautiful, smiling boy in my arms, I felt something happen inside me. Four months later, while I was playing with him on the beach in Cancun, he turned to me with a peal of laughter that lit up his small, blue eyes, he rocked back and forth and bounced in my arms, then he placed his two tiny hands on my face. My breast swelled with an inner strength I had never known, and I made a silent vow that if I ever had to, I would give my life to protect this child from anyone who might do him harm. Babies are born every single day in this world, but when these newly arrived creatures look at us and smile, we are struck by the thought that there is something miraculous about their existence—an entire world’s worth of hope dwells in their eyes. The birth of this little one filled me with strength, with happiness. After all these years, I had an epiphany—the strength that I have developed over time as a result of effort, circumstance, and the decisions of the powerful and corrupt has not reached its limit, it can grow greater still. Press on, every day, until there is not a single person on the face of this planet who thinks that abusing young girls and boy is normal or acceptable. Because to rape, harm, and abuse them is to rape, harm, and abuse the whole of humanity; it is a never-ending cycle of dehumanization. It has been said countless times before—to protect a young girl, a young boy, to give them a loving, wholesome childhood, is nothing less than to take a step toward changing the world.

POETIC JUSTICE

The sun was setting on Wednesday, August 31, 2011. I was in my car when I got an unexpected call. Araceli Andrade, one of the lawyers on the legal team working against Succar Kuri, told me that my presence was required at the federal courthouse in Cancun. The judge in charge of the Succar case, José Mata Oliva, wished to speak with me personally. I hung up and immediately called Lety, the head of security for CIAM Cancun. Then I alerted my lawyers at ARTICLE 19 and organized the trip to the courts, making sure I had my judicial injunction with me. (Every so often, my lawyers take out an injunction for me, so that I cannot be arrested by the Cancun police.) “The whole thing could be a trap, and we don’t want any surprises,” my lawyer cautioned me.

I identified myself at the entrance to the building, and several minutes went by before the judge’s assistant arrived to show me in. I walked into his office, he greeted me with scrupulous formality, and I took a seat across from him at his desk, next to Araceli. I had never seen him in person. Until then, the only thing I knew about him was that he had been charged with reviewing the case after Quintana Roo judge Gabriel García Lanz, in a blatant act of corruption, had the audacity to sentence Succar to a mere thirteen years in prison for his crimes of child pornography and corruption of minors. García Lanz had imposed a fine of just 85,837 pesos on this multimillionaire. Emboldened, Succar appealed the sentence, demanding that he be set free. At the same time, the defense—which was being handled by the Attorney General’s Office on behalf of the girls Succar had abused—made its own appeal, and it was at that point that the case fell into the lap of this judge before whom I now found myself sitting, a judge who had a solid reputation for incorruptibility. I scarcely breathed as I listened to what he had to say.

“I can tell you this now, because Jean Succar Kuri and his lawyers heard the sentence a few hours ago and they know all about it.”

“Tell me, your honor,” I asked in a barely audible voice, fearing the worst—an exoneration.

“I should tell you that have I reviewed each and every piece of evidence carefully. You are familiar with the evidence, are you not?”

I nodded silently.

“Not once in my career as a judge have I ever seen anything as horrifying as the videos Succar and his wife made of themselves preparing those little girls, girls less than eight years old, to be raped. It’s inhuman.”

“Yes, I know,” I said, glancing at Araceli.

“The sentence, which the victims as well as the perpetrators will have formal access to as of now, is 112 years in prison and a fine of 527,174 pesos, and he will also be required to pay 320,000 pesos in damages per victim, a figure designed to allow them to cover the costs of their therapy, future studies, and any health problems resulting from their trauma. In other words, he will be required to pay 2.5 million pesos.”

Araceli and I clasped each other’s hands. We wanted to cry but couldn’t help smiling. A smile accompanied by feelings of incredulity and relief.

“I made the decision to sentence him for each individual case,” the judge went on, “because the law allows me to do so, and because of the seriousness of the crimes. I based my decision on the law against child pornography and human trafficking. And while Article 25 of the Federal Penal Code only allows for a maximum sentence of sixty years in prison, I wanted these girls and boys to understand that this court recognizes their bravery and that these crimes have been substantiated beyond all doubt.”

“But he can appeal this sentence, can’t he?” I asked, fearful of becoming caught up in yet another judicial imbroglio. “He’s sixty-eight years old and he has health problems . . .”

“Yes, he can and he will, but the sentence is firm and the evidence is solid. This man’s powerful position is what’s allowed his defense team to secure him his due process all these years. Would you like to call the girls?” he asked, noticing that I’d been fidgeting with my cell phone.

I looked down at the phone and found that I couldn’t shake the voice of Carmen, the girl who called me the morning we lost our case before the Supreme Court, from my mind. I dialed, and she picked up almost immediately. I told her the good news. Contrary to what I had expected, she remained silent at first, and then spoke calmly.

“Now we can move on with our lives—he won’t abuse any more girls.”

“That’s right,” I replied, impressed by the maturity this girl had developed over the course of seven years of judicial nightmares. I recalled that she was just nine years old when she was freed from the pornography ring, barely capable of speaking, and suffering from severe depression.

“Thank you, Lydia,” she told me. “I’m overwhelmed. I’m going to hang up so that I can call the others.”

“All right,” I said happily.

The courthouse was abuzz with collective excitement. I looked at the young women and men who worked side by side with this exemplary judge, this judge who had never given in to the offers of money or the threats.

One of the young men working at the courthouse had a copy of The Demons of Eden. He held out a pen to me and asked with a smile, “Would you dedicate this? I was in Puebla studying law when you were arrested, and ever since that day, I’ve been working to specialize in these areas; things have to change in Mexico.”

When we left the building, the press was already waiting for us. Araceli and I stuck to what was most important: The sentence is a historic one for Latin America, for Mexico; it establishes a precedent against child pornography and human trafficking; there are still three active cases involving young girls and boys abused at the hands of the same network Succar Kuri headed; we mustn’t forget about them.

We said our good-byes, and I drove home. I called my family to tell them about the good news.

So this is what it feels like to win, I thought as I sat next to Jorge at our home in Cancun. This is what peace of mind is, this is the peace that justice brings. It’s so different from the dissatisfaction of vengeance.

One week later, I received a telephone call from an unknown number. This time, when I picked up, I felt distracted and carefree. But then a colleague of mine spoke abruptly on the other end of the phone.

“Lydia,” she said in an anxious tone, “I understand that you’re happy, but you mustn’t forget that when the judge called you to testify against Succar, Succar swore right there in the middle of that high-security prison, in front of your lawyers and the judge himself, that if he was sentenced, he would see to it that you were killed, even if it was the last thing he did in his life.”

“I know, I remember,” I replied, weary at noting the bitter taste of worry in my mouth once more. I hung up, but not without first promising her that I would get together with my lawyers and security advisor to assess the seriousness of the threat.

While preparing my security strategy, a source working at the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) in Mexico City contacted me to request a meeting. I imagined he wanted to speak to me about my investigations into human trafficking, or perhaps about my book Slavery, Inc. Many American and Canadian citizens travel to the Playa del Carmen to have sex with minors, and I thought he might have some questions for me on the subject.

I met with him in Mexico City. To my surprise, the topic of conversation was neither the white slave trade nor the trafficking of undocumented immigrants, issues that he and I had discussed during an interview a year earlier. What he wanted was to alert me to the fact that intelligence sources had learned that Succar’s wife and children were back in Cancun, staying at the Solymar Villas. Although Gloria Pita, wife and accomplice of the recently sentenced pedophile, was still living in her Los Angeles mansion, she had accompanied her children to Cancun, and the ICE had received a tip from a Mexican source that the Succars had been putting out feelers among corrupt police agents to find a hit man for a “little job” that needed doing. This American ICE agent thought the “little job” might be a hit on me, and he wanted to warn me. Although his information was of little use to me without proof, I thanked him for thinking of me and taking the trouble to warn me. And even if I did have proof, I explained to him, the authorities have told me in no uncertain terms that making death threats is not a crime, and neither is hiring someone. If there’s no weapon and no crime has been committed, no charges can be brought, as the special prosecutor for crimes against journalists informed me.

“Perhaps, Ms. Cacho,” the agent suggested, “you could ask my government to reopen the case against Mrs. Pita; after all, the evidence is there, and we don’t really know for sure—it could be that the network is still operating inside the United States with American girls. Don’t forget, Succar’s capture in 2004 was made possible because the U.S. Marshals Service in Los Angeles was acting on a provisional arrest warrant issued as part of an extradition process. Why don’t your lawyers check with the Mexican embassy? This is a case of binational jurisdiction; it’s not just a Mexican problem. We’ve got hundreds of Mexican girls being trafficked into my country to be exploited in illegal brothels. You know this.”

I did know it, but the problem was unmanageably big. There was no money left to keep paying lawyers who might take the case to Los Angeles. Moreover, we would need the support of the Calderón administration, and as we were already well aware, his administration was in fact protecting the political heads who were running the network. We would have to get the United States Justice Department involved and confirm whether Succar had set up his bank accounts in his wife’s and children’s names. And then, if we managed to prove the wife’s guilt (theoretically, the same videos the American judge had seen and upon the strength of whose content he had decided to extradite Succar should provide evidence enough), we could demand an investigation and demonstrate the ties existing between these child pornography, human trafficking, and money laundering mafias, whose ranks include Mexican politicians and businessmen. Kamel Nacif, Succar’s protector, already had a criminal record in the American state of Nevada and he had been denied an American entry visa under the Obama administration. All the cards were on the table.

One week after this meeting, I was forced to leave my home suddenly, escorted by the organized crime unit of the police, because of information from a Mexican police report that a contract killer was on my tail and that he had orders to murder me. I have since returned home, but only after spending several weeks in Europe waiting for everything to blow over. I did what I have done on countless other occasions and what I will no doubt have to do again on countless more—I publicly condemned the threats made against me, and I fled to save my life and to give my colleagues and the ranks of honest police officers time to investigate those seeking to harm me, while my lawyers reported the threats for the umpteenth time. The key is to let these hit men know that we know where they are, that we have video cameras, alarm systems, and, in some cases, even their telephone numbers. It’s a pitched battle in which admitting defeat can mean losing your life. I have witnessed the deaths of several of my fellow journalists. I have spoken to young reporters who didn’t believe the threats would amount to anything and who ended up murdered mere weeks later because they refused to report anything, to get out of town, to search for clues, names, emails, and likely suspects. We are at war, a war against freedom of expression, against human rights, and it is far better to err on the side of caution than to lose one’s life.

ARTICLE 19 published an investigative report focusing on the situation of aggression against journalists in Mexico. The report proves that during the 2009–2011 period, the main perpetrators of acts of aggression against journalists were overwhelmingly state actors. Seventy-seven journalists were attacked by members of state police forces; federal police agents assaulted six journalists; municipal police agents, seven; and members of the armed forces, forty-one. To put it another way, state security forces, the very same forces that are charged with maintaining law and order, were responsible not only for a third of all assaults occurring from 2009 to 2011 but for half of the assaults committed specifically against members of the press in that same two-year period. In other words, the police state operates as an oppressor of freedom of expression.

Similarly, twenty-four assaults with a firearm or explosives against the offices of media outlets were linked to organized crime, as were twelve of the total twenty-seven murders involving journalists and other media collaborators, and two out of four cases of forced disappearance. In short, seven out of ten serious assaults are related to organized crime.

We journalists are endeavoring to document the reality of the situation on the ground in Mexico, and we have been caught between two sets of crosshairs. The trouble is that when we report on the state’s complicity with mafia activity, both sides end up turning their sights on us. We can trust no one but ourselves.

The ARTICLE 19 report reminds us that stepping out of line and daring to finger a criminal boss are acts that will be punished and that more often than not, retribution will be marked by extreme brutality.

Lucía Lagunes, director of the women’s-rights-focused news agency CIMAC Noticias—the first agency I ever worked at, more than fifteen years ago—reminds me that being a reporter who happens to be female is doubly dangerous. Femicides have increased 68 percent in the year from 2010 to 2011. In the space of fifteen months, 3,140 women and girls have disappeared from nine states across the country, while the corresponding state attorneys general’s offices do nothing to enforce their search-and-rescue protocols, alleging that these women and girls have simply run away of their own volition.

Colombia experienced a similar phenomenon with the strengthening of their drug cartels and the weakening of their state. During that country’s own war on drugs, Colombian women came to be treated as objects of lust, and their disappearance was viewed as utterly inconsequential in a context of war and exacerbated violence. In Mexico today, just like in Colombia, we are seeing how cartels are involved in the sexual exploitation of women, in kidnapping for the purposes of rape and murder. When the cat’s away, the mice will have their field day.

Not even a small portion of the weight of the law has been brought to bear in Mexico on those who ended the lives of thirteen female journalists, or on those who made death threats against another hundred more and jailed and persecuted them. Nor has any light been shed on the deaths of eleven human rights advocates—four of whom were colleagues and personal friends of mine—who dedicated themselves body and soul to protecting the lives and integrity of the people in their communities. Our fears are well founded, which is why when I know that a particular threat creates a window of opportunity to kill me, I protect myself and leave the country. But I always come back, because I refuse to be forcibly pushed out or silenced by corrupt powers. Because I have the inalienable right to live in my own home, in my own land.

THE SLAVES SPEAK OUT

In January 2009, my publishing house gave me an advance to cover expenses for the second part of the travels I was making to investigate human trafficking networks operating in different areas of the world. I had previously put together a detailed layout of the routes the cartels and mafias use to transport women and girls around the globe. I packed a large canvas duffel bag with cold-weather clothing and set out on a journey that would last several months. Alone, with my camera, my tape recorder, a notebook, and my list of NGO contacts as my only provisions, I traveled to London, Turkey, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and the Afghan border with China. From there I flew to Thailand, where I traced the routes along which young girls are traded, venturing through the interior of the country to Burma (Myanmar). I then traveled through the villages of Vietnam, which I found reminded me a great deal of Mexico. After concluding this portion of my investigation, I headed to Japan to investigate the Yakuza in Tokyo and Osaka. And from there I flew to Los Angeles in order to document the Tokyo-Hawai’i-California route for the transportation of drugs and Asian women to the United States. I had investigated human trafficking in India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, as well as in Latin America, on earlier trips. I was making progress on my documentation for Slavery, Inc., and I felt sure that my work would be a positive contribution—demonstrating how ties between different cartels and human trafficking mafias are formed at the global level, investigating the origins of the problem, and documenting who the clients of these networks were in all the different parts of the world, as well as who their protectors were.

LOOKING AT MY HEALTH AND THE FUTURE

In the latter part of 2010, I began a new battle for my health. I had started falling ill constantly, despite following a slew of preventative medical measures and sticking to a healthy diet. I had just launched Slavery, Inc., and while the subsequent tour was no doubt responsible for my exhaustion, it could not be the sole cause of the imbalances that were showing up on every one of my laboratory tests. Nobody, not even I myself, could understand it; I didn’t look—and I don’t look—like a sick person; all my friends reminded me of this fact constantly. Nevertheless, during the landing on a flight to the capital one afternoon, I collapsed in the airplane, and when I came to, I found myself in an ambulance at the Mexico City airport. I called my brother José, and he took me to a hospital emergency room. I eventually found an excellent doctor. Under the care of Dr. Valpuesta and an expert hepatologist, I underwent a biopsy, only to discover that I suffer from the same autoimmune disease that had killed my mother. After repeating the tests to confirm the results and then seeking out additional opinions, the doctors agreed that my disease was genetic in origin, and that extreme precautions had to be taken. My liver and remaining kidney were severely damaged.

Although stress may well have weakened my immune system, all the tests indicated that my body wasn’t going to hold out much longer, as a hepatologist in Barcelona, Spain, informed me. Ghostly visions of the suffering my mother had endured for three agonizing years before passing away haunted my dreams and my waking thoughts. I made the decision to isolate myself from other people. I had a tour planned for France, Italy, Sweden, and other countries where translations of my book had been published. But what I needed was to be alone, in my home near the ocean. Only there, surrounded by the tranquility of that special place, near my flower and vegetable gardens, would I be able to recover the calm I needed to be able to make decisions. Several months went by, during which I worked radically less than usual. I handed over my post at CIAM entirely, leaving it in the expert hands of my dedicated colleagues. For whole wretched weeks at a time, I lay in bed, unable to move as the days went by and the doctors went after my disease with experimental treatments that left me completely spent. I felt a fear that was unfamiliar to me, fear at waking up one day to find my body paralyzed, unresponsive to my strength of will. Fear at the weakness of cloudy eyes no longer able to read. Fear at discovering my memory reduced to a feeling of having already written everything there is to say and being confronted now with a blank page and nothing but questions. I cried myself to sleep on many of those nights, curled up with a pain that was tearing at my veins, focused on the murmuring sound of my heart, beating slowly, like the heart of a wounded soldier gradually slipping away, giving himself over to the dark, cold night.

No more of this! I thought during these months of voluntary isolation. I’ve never had the heart of a nun or any such self-sacrificing woman; I refuse to become a perennial victim. Nobody, myself included, deserves suffering, uncertainty, the torment of death, or the never-ending howl of violence. This is a battle for dignity, not for martyrdom or sacrifice. At my side, my family, my dear friends, my therapists—all of them repeating fervently, If you give up, you accept that the disease is going to take you. One evening when I was feverish and exhausted, a kind friend placed a piece of paper in my hand. It was a fragment of a poem by Mario Benedetti, the poet of my teenage years:

       Don’t give up, please, don’t give in,

       Though the cold may scorch,

       Though fear may gnaw,

       Though the sun may set and the wind fall silent

       There is still fire in your soul,

       There is still life in your dreams,

       Because each day is a new beginning,

       Because the time and the best moment are now.

       Because you are not alone, because I love you.

My assistant Karla began the task of sorting through the overwhelming number of emails I was receiving, sometimes over a hundred a day. There were invitations to give talks on the prevention of violence, requests to file claims on behalf of many dozens of victims seeking my moral support. It was only then, knowing that I couldn’t even make it down the stairs in my own home, that I became fully aware of the need for more heroes and heroines in this country. There are victims who require proper refuge, and it is not enough for them to be seen and heard—they need a working justice system and for their communities to have the capacity to protect them and help them overcome their pain. Marches and protests can make it easier for people to visualize and comprehend the magnitude of a tragedy, but at times they can generate an even greater sense of frustration and the whole thing can become something like moving through the Stations of the Cross—shouldering causes back and forth, shouldering sadness back and forth, feeding feelings of desperation and anger. It’s strange: So many people seek me out to ask for help or guidance or inspiration, despite the fact that I’ve lost the majority of my legal battles; they want to know the secret of my fortitude, to drink it in, to go on believing that change is something they can hope for.

The mother of a girl who had been kidnapped by the Zetas to be used as a sex slave in a bar wrote to me one day as follows: “Lydia, for the love of God, help us, only you can stand up to the people who took my little girl. I pray to the glorious Virgin and to you, protect my daughter.” I read these words of hers and I wept, right there in my bedroom. I am no one special, I’m a normal, middle-class Mexican woman; I’ve simply learned to use my strength for something I consider to be of vital importance—the eradication of violence and inequality.

Karla set energetically about referring all these victims who were contacting me to other activists, some to Javier Sicilia and others to the Child Rights Network, an organization offering protection and assistance to girls and boys.

I was forced to cancel the presentation of my book in Germany, where I would have sat side by side with my revered masters Günter Wallraff and Carolin Emcke. I did manage to attend one awards ceremony, spending the entire day in the hotel beforehand in order to recover from the journey there and to keep up my strength for the event itself.

This is the first time I have ever discussed my illness publicly. When your public persona comes to acquire a certain degree of fame, that life can intrude on and interfere with your private life, too; we lose those essential spaces that allow what my mother called our secret lives—the part of our lives that feeds our souls, a dear little life that no one can touch or spoil—to take place. Fame can be a difficult thing to live with in such a context, because society’s conception of power is plagued with false expectations; it requires masks and a simplistic view of who leaders are and what leadership is. To journey down the path of notoriety is to venture into a minefield where arrogance and an outsize attention to one’s own ego can become overwhelming. To understand fame as the objective of a journalist’s career is to turn experts into boors, individuals of courage into cynics, and accidental victims into professional ones. The truth is that we are all survivors of human tragedy, of a dehumanizing, reductionist system that downplays the importance of everything that compels us to polish, care for, and shore up that immense mirror that allows us a clear view into that which is human and good, as well as all that which destroys good. The freedom of expression that we defend, sometimes at the expense of our lives, our health, or our solitude, is no less than a life-giving draught, because where there is communication among people, there is understanding. People who understand each other can feel compassion for one another despite the differences that may exist between them, and those who recognize those differences and acknowledge the humanity of others are the ones who come together to take water where there is drought, to bring justice to those who have been aggressed, or to help plant food for those who are hungry. When communication is manipulated by the powers that be, it tears apart the most human facets of our lives and our society, it crushes hope, it divides us and forces us to retreat, because it makes us believe that it is all but impossible for any of us to be heroes or heroines.

Good journalism, together with social activism, is an essential tool that serves to humanize; it helps us to see ourselves more clearly. To remember that the lives of others are valuable, to remember the importance of our own lives, not as heroic figures but simply as people who experience love and happiness, who strive for freedom, and who create a framework of leadership to promote those ideas.

I am distrustful of that brand of fame and all those who seek to label us as “special.” For that reason, I avoid the cliques of movers and shakers, the in-groups of power that are perpetuated in the world of the media just as they are in any other world. I almost never discuss my fragile health. I prefer to focus on everything positive that has happened over the years, on the many achievements and demonstrations of solidarity I have witnessed. On that pristine drop of water that falls over and over, second after second, and that is slowly transforming the landscape of humanity. The scale of our combined efforts to build peace is astounding. I am filled with the spirit of these efforts every time sickness confines me to my bed, and then I breathe easy. It’s worth being a part of that wellspring of life, of course it’s worth it—just look around you.

On Saturday, November 12, 2011, I got myself out of bed in order to accompany two thousand high school and university students on a march organized by I Am Not for Sale, a campaign I thought up while seated alone at my computer and later brought to fruition with the help of the team at CIAM. While on bed rest, I developed a tool kit of educational materials that would be distributed to students between the ages of thirteen and twenty-one. I led an initial workshop to train five hundred young people and their teachers. The idea is very simple: To educate is to bring out and share something you have within yourself, and so in order to educate these girls and boys about human trafficking, we put together a model that allowed them to see how human trafficking networks operate, how they snare their victims. Rather than scaring these potential victims, we would have to offer them empowerment, knowledge, and tools.

And that is precisely what we did—after a year of work, nearly ten thousand young people were now qualified to train other students, specifically, to teach them to detect traffickers who might be hanging around outside schools and to understand the effects of forced prostitution. We need thousands of young activists, and we need them to avoid becoming victims themselves, so that they can uncover the strength and bravery that will allow them to protect themselves and others.

And the campaign worked. The march the students organized was an inspiring display. As they each took their turn at the podium, they spoke about their experiences educating elementary school children, both girls and boys, about human trafficking. One young man brought tears to my eyes when he took the microphone and told those listening how he had been stopped and offered money to get into a luxury-model car and have sex with a man inside. The boy was in need of money for books, but now that he understood the dangers of sexual exploitation, he ran away. When I returned home after the event, I was both exhausted and moved. This is what we have to do, I thought to myself: to beg children’s forgiveness for the world we are leaving them and equip them with the tools they need to change the course of things, with peaceful, compassionate leaders, not warriors or conquerors, but transformers, because their bravery lies not in weapons or a will to control but in their convictions and their ability to live together peaceably.

Now that I was back home, my sickness and the intense treatment I was undergoing left me no other choice than to go back to reading poetry, meditating, and taking sunset walks on the beach. I fell off the map, and except for the columns I was writing, I did very little apart from resting and trying to stay on top of a combined course of alternative and allopathic treatments in order to keep my body in some approximation of a balanced state. I began to take a turn for the worse in December of 2011, when my health collapsed to the point that my life was in danger. As always, my friends Alicia, Lía, and Dr. María were there to take care of me, as were my family and other close friends. At the end of that same month, my relationship with Jorge, which had recently begun to break down, came to a definitive end. He was unable to take on my illness—he was experiencing his own difficulties—and we bid each other a sorrowful good-bye.

True to form, my family—my tribe—rushed to the rescue. They took turns caring for me, and they made sure I always had all the medicine and treatments I needed. As 2012 dawned, I felt a new, different strength stirring within me. In a meeting I had with her in Mexico City, Jean Shinoda Bolen, Jungian analyst and author of the book Goddesses in Everywoman, insisted that what I noticed within myself, that novel strength, is what is known as wisdom. I’m not entirely convinced that this is the case, but I acknowledge, as she requested I do, that at forty-nine years of age, I have lived a life full of marvelous adventures and challenges that have made me an example for others. I accept this role with the utmost humility possible.

January 2012 came around after a month of great changes. Following a lengthy, thorough process of reflection, the team and I determined that it was no longer feasible for the women and children’s shelter to continue to operate. I had previously handed over the day-to-day management to my colleagues, but I was still the president of the board. Some adjustments had been made to accommodate everyone in the new situation, but the wear and tear on the rest of the team was simply too great, and for some time I had already been considering shifting the focus of my work to comprehensive education for peace. The team was ready; they had enough experience to allow them to train thousands of people in victim assistance and to work with children and young people against the resurgence of sexism and the culture of violence and murder for hire that this disgraceful war against drugs had unleashed.

While I was in the hospital, several members of the team made a public announcement to the effect that the Comprehensive Women’s Care Center (CIAM Cancun, NPC), our shelter for women and their children, would slowly be converted into a training and education center for peace and the prevention of gender and social violence. I wrote the following letter, which was circulated publicly:

As of January 2012, CIAM will cease to offer assistance, rescue, and shelter services to women and children, in order to focus on the education and orientation of social and educational institutions directly or closely involved in assisting victims of gender violence, be they women, young people, or children. We are not shutting down, we are transforming.

On the one hand, ten years of experience in the field of victim assistance has allowed us to develop a model that has garnered multiple international recognitions and is capable of being reproduced in communities in practically every corner of the globe, and in Latin America in particular. The work carried out by our team of women and men has produced some invaluable results, including the specialization of experts in the areas of prevention, rescue, attention, and social reintegration of victims of all manner of gender violence. Additionally, we have generated a database detailing the characteristics of victims, their aggressors, and their children, their sociocultural backgrounds, their origins, educational levels, and so on. This has allowed us to dispel some of the myths surrounding the topic of violence against women, young people, and children. Every life saved, every family that has been able to develop the tools they need to reconstruct their lives in a context free from violence was worth all the effort, all the threats, all the government and mafia pressure.

Every institution goes through a life cycle; those that remain stuck in the past tend to become fragmented, worn out, and their missions eventually become bereft of meaning. Over the course of the last decade, we have trained hundreds of people and opened new shelters for women and children in Quintana Roo; these shelters will see to it that victims there are not left unprotected.

The number of women, young people, and children affected by this phenomenon all over the world, and in Mexico in particular, continues to increase rather than decrease. Gender violence is not only on the rise, it is becoming markedly crueler—femicides, sexual violence, and human trafficking have all experienced upsurges. The direct and indirect activities of organized crime networks, taken together with negligence on the part of the state and the proven links between organized crime and law enforcement, make it impossible to safeguard the defense and protection of human rights, not only the rights of victims and their families but also of skilled human rights advocates who lay their lives and honor on the line every day.

We understand that within Mexico’s current context of violence, progress will not be possible as long as the source of the violence remains unaddressed. It is clear to us that our experience in this field allows us to participate more directly and assertively in these matters and to have a greater impact on the creation of a peaceful society that will apply an appropriate gender perspective not only to women and girls but also to boys, who can fall victim to nascent conceptions of masculinity that push them toward violence and social exclusion.

Our extraordinary success these past ten years, together with the more recent I Am Not for Sale campaign—which was initiated by CIAM Cancun, NPO, and for the last several months has been headed and run by nearly eight thousand students between the ages of ten and twenty-one—demonstrates that a strategy of working together with new generations, of promoting prevention, and of educating in positive values aimed at peaceful, egalitarian coexistence is the best strategy in both the medium and the long term.

On the other hand, the funding crisis that nonprofit organizations have been experiencing has deepened in recent years, making the financing of our activities impossible. The economic downturn has hardened public policy and cut the federal, state, and municipal budgets that allow our nurses, psychologists, social workers, peace educators, and lawyers to draw anything resembling a reasonable salary in exchange for their work assisting thousands of women and children. Philanthropic organizations from the private sector at both the national and international level have likewise made significant reductions in their support of efforts against gender violence, and particularly in the areas of human trafficking and violence against women. There are sufficient resources to fund victims’ rescues, but not enough for them to rebuild independent lives for themselves. The tendency on the part of governments to hold up tallies of rescued trafficking victims as evidence that they are complying with international policies has given rise to a perverse perspective in which it is only victims’ pasts that hold any importance, and not their futures as survivors able to live in conditions of freedom and safety.

We are deeply grateful to all those who have been able to join with us over the years and aid more than ten thousand people annually through special donations and moral and financial support. Every life that we were able to help was worth all the effort, every rekindled sense of optimism reawakened our own hope that Mexico will one day be a country free from violence, where equality is an absolute right rather than an occasional, unexpected boon.

We are still here, and we will continue do what we can with what we have.

Here we stand, for equality and peace, and we will never take a single step backward.

When I founded CIAM, I decided that I would never draw a salary from it—I always lived off my work as a journalist and from giving conferences and workshops—but I worried now about what might happen to the other team members if they ended up out of work. Fortunately, with the training and experience they had gained at CIAM, they all found positions in other organizations. It was a moment of great sadness for all of us; we felt a distinct sense of loss, but we knew that we had to adapt and move forward. We would not give up—we simply needed to find different strategies to continue working without making outrageous sacrifices, to continue working from a position of greater strength and security. Logical coherence dictates that human rights advocates must protect and defend themselves in the same manner and to the same degree as they protect the victims they aid; in this, too, there must be equality.

CIAM remained in operation with a small working group of thirteen individuals who are currently developing an educational model for the prevention of gender and social violence, as well as continuing work on the I Am Not for Sale campaign. I assisted these colleagues of mine in the development of a master plan for peace education that incorporates a gender perspective and then left the institution in their hands. It was an institution that had begun as a dream of mine more than fourteen years ago, when I came to the realization that it was not enough to condemn violence, but that instruments would have to be created to break the cycle of that violence and ensure that those who have suffered as a result of it know that society stands with them and is protecting them, so that they, in turn, can educate society about other forms of coexistence. Now I left this institution behind, and I cofounded the Red Nacional de Refugios para Mujeres [National Network of Women’s Shelters], which currently operates forty nonprofit women’s aid shelters across the country. When we started out, thirteen years ago, there were four. The numbers are encouraging, and our achievements are tangible.

FOLLOW THE MONEY TO FIND THE CRIME

There is a maxim in the world of journalism: If you want to find the crime, you have to follow the money. This strategy can sometimes work, and on this occasion—to the dismay of Mario Marín, the famous “Precious Guv’”—it did. With the arrival of a new governor in the state of Puebla, public records came to light revealing that embezzlement and indebtedness incurred during Marín’s six-year term in office. SEIDO opened an investigation, looking to confirm possible illicit gains made by the former governor. In February 2012, while Governor Marín was busy leaving his state with a public debt of nine billion pesos, his son, Mario Marín García, having recently married the young Austrian woman Nadja Ludmer, was sharing photographs on Facebook of his luxurious lifestyle in Europe. The new couple was showing off their chalet in Wels, an Alpine region in Austria, to their friends from Puebla.

The reporter Roberto Soriano followed the lead and discovered that this home, owned by the governor’s son, is “located in one of the most exclusive regions in the world, renowned as a refuge for princes, kings, magnates, and the Hollywood elite.” The property is valued at US$5 million. Investigations were also able to uncover the existence of a mansion in Converse, Texas, at 8415 Whitebrush Street, worth over US$1.5 million. Additionally, official registries in Hialeah, Florida, list Marín García as the owner of a Lago Grande residence, Condo Three, valued at more than US$1 million. In conjunction with the investigations carried out by journalists and the federal authorities, it was documented that Marín’s children, nieces, and nephews, as well as the former governor himself, were driving Porsche, BMW, and Cadillac sports cars in both Mexico and the United States.

Mario Marín’s son acted as a straw owner of his father’s fortune. It is impossible, according to SEIDO authorities, for a person of his age to have acquired such wealth. The authorities are investigating the methods used to triangulate monetary resources that may have come from a combination of public funds misappropriated by the governor directly and kickbacks received in exchange for political favors, as it is plain that the income generated from the legal businesses in his name does not match up with either the total amount of wealth he has accumulated to date or the lifestyle he, his children, and his wife enjoy.

During those same first few months of 2012, the authorities detained several members of Marín’s inner circle. Alfredo Arango García, Secretary of Health during Marín’s term, was arrested for illicit gain. As of the present moment in 2013, SEIDO continues to pursue Marín and, as part of Criminal Case Number 6/2012, has already submitted evidence attesting to illicit gains on the part of the former governor and eight others to the judge at the Twelfth District Court for Federal Criminal Cases of Mexico City.

Writing in the weekly Acento Veintiuno about how Marín had absconded from justice, Roberto Soriano wrote, “Intelligence agencies report that he has already left the country in order to avoid his imminent detention; the country he has chosen to make his escape to: Holland.” I tasked myself with trying to confirm whether there were any indications of Marín’s having entered that particular country. Immigration services did indeed register him as having made an arrival in Amsterdam, but he then returned to Puebla and has held meetings with high-ranking members of the PRI there on five occasions since. On February 22, 2013, the Puebla edition of the daily Acento Veintiuno published the following information on Mario Marín’s reappearance in Mexico:

Last Friday, February 15, 2013, Julieta Octavia Marín Torres—former federal deputy for the 16th District, headquartered in Ajalpan, and sister of the “Precious Guv’”—attended the meeting held by the PRI in Puebla, a meeting at which the party’s national leadership, headed by César Camacho and Ivonne Ortega, was also present.

When interviewed, Ms. Marín confirmed the former governor’s intention to return to politics, a move that would allow him to emerge from the state of ostracism in which he has been mired since 2010, when he left his post amid serious suspicions of corruption. The accusations even led to the jailing of his former health secretary, while his colleague and friend Javier García Ramírez still has an active arrest warrant out against him.

“We aren’t going to count ourselves out, we’re waiting for the party primary to be called and then, if we can, why not? We’re not dead, we’re alive.”

“It’s payback time,” he told many of his former colleagues and accomplices after gathering them together at the close of the previous year at a resort spa owned by Rodolfo Chávez Carretero, where they were discovered plotting and scheming.

The photographic evidence is irrefutable. There can be no doubt—the conspiracy to regain power in Puebla is under way. The words of the “Precious Guv’” leave no room for doubt, either: “We are going to take back Puebla for the PRI and for ourselves.”

I took up my notes from the Succar-Nacif-Marín case and began to go over them again. One of the young Mexican girls who had fallen victim to the Cancun sex trafficking network affirmed in a statement in 2004 that three American girls from Florida were brought over on a private plane, which they said belonged to a governor. That line of investigation was never followed up on, but now, in 2012, the American Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has uncovered the existence of a company called Servicios Aéreos Mileneo [S.A. de C.V.; a variable capital society whose name translates as Millennium Air Services], whose main clients are the Puebla state government and the PRI administrations in nine other Mexican states. Former governor Marín is known to have made an illegal allocation of US$66.4 million of public funds for the purchase of a fleet of helicopters and airplanes through his son Mario Marín García and other straw men, who have already given statements to the authorities.

I verified with official sources at the DEA that their investigation is in fact the fruit of a joint effort undertaken with SEIDO. The weekly Acento Veintiuno published a conversation in which the Puebla state deputy Ricardo Urzúa (PRI) explains how the then governor of Quintana Roo, Joaquín Hendricks, gave the “Precious Guv’” US$3 million for the fleet. The company was created with public funds but is owned by Marín’s son, who is now under investigation because, according to both the DEA and SEIDO, drug boss Arturo Beltrán Leyva is known to have traveled on one of its airplanes several times in 2010. This all came to light because Mexican businessman Darío López Fernández was arrested at Miami International Airport in July 2010 for bulk cash smuggling. The DEA and SEIDO confirmed that López Fernández had purchased a Bell helicopter, registration number XA-IMS, from Maclovio Hernández, who has been tied to narcotrafficking operations. López Fernández and Hernández owned a business that used a Beechcraft King Air, registration number XB-DLS, and a Cessna 182, registration number XB-KWE, which is how the Mexican Attorney General’s Office identified that the aircraft had also been used by Beltrán Leyva in order to escape a police raid in Puebla. It is the very same aircraft that was used to transport Marín’s chosen successor to the governorship, Javier López Zavala, during the latter’s electoral campaign. Marín was under close scrutiny at this point, with serious accusations having already been made against him to the effect that he was protecting a criminal network involved in the sex trafficking of minors, and yet his businesses and his ties to dangerous friends were allowed to continue without ever missing a beat.

On November 15, 2010, I published this information in my column in the national newspaper El Universal; I included all the same aircraft information that you, the reader, will find below. A few days later, during a layover at the Mexico City airport while returning to Cancun from Spain, where I had been doing some investigative work, a man approached me.

“Ms. Cacho,” he addressed me amiably in front of ten or so other people who, like me, were all waiting in line to board the airplane. “I read your column about Mario Marín and his airplanes. It was very good, but it’s very dangerous, isn’t it? I bet you’re scared to be flying back to Cancun.”

Still smiling, the individual made a smooth about-face and sauntered away toward the international departure gates without even waiting for my reply. A businessman from Cancun who was a longtime acquaintance of mine had been standing next to me the entire time, and now he leaned in toward me, his face pale.

“Did I hear that right? I think he just threatened you—we have to do something.”

Ex-governor Mario Marín is the owner of seven 407-model Bell helicopters worth a total of US$21 million, two 206 Bells, and two Augusta helicopters valued at US$16 million. Additionally, he paid US$600,000 for two Cessna 2008 XA-TWT aircraft. He also has a Sabre Cinergo, registration number XA-GUR, worth US$300,000, a Dassault Falcon 20 priced at US$350,000, and four Learjet 45s. An INTERPOL agent assures me that the evidence to back all this up is rock solid. I followed the trail of several of these aircraft personally, through a variety of different civilian airports. Flying on them at one time or another, among others, were the following men, all governors at the time: Mario Marín (Puebla), Joaquín Hendricks (Quintana Roo), Pablo Salazar (Chiapas), Fidel Herrera (Veracruz), Ulises Ruiz (Oaxaca), Ismael Hernández (candidate and governor of Durango), Enrique Peña Nieto (then governor of the State of Mexico), and Tomás Yarrington (Tamaulipas). The governors of the states of Nuevo León, Nayarit, Querétaro, and Tabasco also chartered these aircraft at different points. All of them were aware that the company belongs to Marín, and all of them contributed public funds to it, in a business model that could be likened to a timeshare. A variety of senators and congressional deputies are also known to have hired the company’s aircraft when they wished to give third parties the impression they owned a private airplane. But lies are no match for official record books.

Both President Felipe Calderón and the attorney general of Mexico, Marisela Morales, had access to this information. Intelligence personnel from the American embassy in Mexico informed me that their country’s ICE had used diplomatic channels to petition for special attention to be paid to any and all aircraft and properties registered in Mario Marín’s name. There was sufficient formal evidence to prove collusion on the part of public servants, illicit transportation of undeclared cash, and probable links to organized crime. The president was in a position to make a high-profile arrest in order to demonstrate that his government was truly willing to take a stand against the ever-strengthening ties between mafias and state governors. Personnel from the Mexican Army Air Force who collaborated with the DEA and ICE to catch Darío López Fernández smuggling cash into Florida insisted there was evidence against Marín. A general who was a member of the intelligence team for the Mérida Initiative²³²³ revealed the following information to me in an interview: “We told the president that Mario Marín was an exemplary case, given his history of protecting pedophiles, and now all of this on top of it . . . but he didn’t want anything to do with the case; nobody understands why the president simply didn’t want anything to do with it.”

Translator’s Note: The Mérida Initiative is a security cooperation agreement between the governments of the United States, Mexico, and the Central American countries. Its purpose is to combat the interrelated problems of organized crime, money laundering, and drug trafficking.

The case provided clear documentation of the shameful squandering of millions of dollars of public money on Mario Marín’s aircraft company. Mayors, governors, and senators flitting around in private jets and helicopters, not for emergency reasons but to improve their own political images. A company that was used, according to binational investigations, to export large sums of cash from Mexico to Texas and Florida. A company operating under the opacity of straw men, whose identities have since been revealed; a company used to transport minors, dirty money, criminals, and politicians. All the evidence was handed over to the authorities. Now, from 2013 to 2017, the case will be in the hands of the current Mexican attorney general, Jesús Murillo Karam, a member of the PRI and personal friend of over half the governors who made use of the aircraft in question. Despite all of this, the case may still move forward; only time will tell. The well-wishing of some of Marín’s colleagues notwithstanding, the truth of the matter is that both SEIDO and INTERPOL have files open on the former governor—files that include my own formal complaints and now others, as well—for acts of corruption, misappropriation of public funds, and a whole range of violations of citizens’ individual guarantees committed during his term in office. At the end of 2012, the online newspaper sinembargo.mx published the following article about Marín’s return:

Fernando Moreno Peña, the National Executive Committee (CEN) delegate for the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), has declared that he met with former governor Mario Marín Torres, a personal friend of his, a few days before the party’s candidates were to be nominated.

He stressed that the former Puebla governor—in contrast to Elba Esther Gordillo Morales, the erstwhile longtime leader of the National Education Workers Union (SNTE)—has not been charged with anything and is not in jail.

“I have seen Mario Marín in private conversations and he is an active member of the PRI; his presence will not affect the party, but this whole Elba Ester thing will, because she’s in jail for being involved in organized crime, while Mario Marín is free,” he explained.

Moreno Peña went on to mention that Marín’s outfit would be working with the PRI on the current electoral campaign, and that party activists—Marín included—were eager to make up the seats they lost in 2010.

He denied that Marín Torres’s image would have an effect on his party, given that the former governor’s name would not be appearing on any election ballots, his participation would be limited to supporting the party through his membership, and he had not, moreover, been charged with any crime.

“According to the international ratings agency Standard and Poor’s, Marín Torres negotiated a skillful capital repayment on the entirety of the state’s debt, using the revenue shares the state of Puebla would receive from the federal government—the transfer of said shares having begun to be paid out in this case in August 2011—as collateral.”

“At the beginning of Marín Torres’s term, the state of Puebla owed almost zero liabilities. But by 2008, Marín Torres was facing a legal case against him for the scandal surrounding the recorded conversations of his, a scandal that led to the illegal, arbitrary detention of the journalist Lydia Cacho,” the website puebl@media.com explains.

“This led in turn to an initial public debt of 3.5 billion pesos, which he spent on his legal defense before the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation. He then chartered more than 500 hours of helicopter flights for himself and his defense team, led by attorney Juan Velázquez. The ‘Precious Guv’’ spent more than 32 million pesos of state money on this transaction. The numbers are overwhelming if one considers that every hour of flight costs US$5,000, according to the airplane and helicopter rental agency Flyjets, whose calculations took into account the aircraft models and Mario Marín’s flight distances and times,” the puebl@media.com article says.

According to puebl@media.com, “the travel stipends for his defense team allowed, among other things, for luxury hotels on Campos Elíseos Avenue in Mexico City, at upwards of ten thousand pesos per night per room. By July of 2010, Mario Marín had paid out 500 million from the Puebla treasury for a marketing and advertising campaign aimed at restoring his public image, which had deteriorated not only at the state level but across the entire country.”

Despite the fact that Marín claimed publicly to still be working at his public notary office, those offices are in fact semi-deserted, and Marín’s substitute, Vicente Gil Luna, who oversees some of the office’s operations, has not been officially designated as a deputy notary. The logs for the INTERPOL special investigation unit and a similar unit at the Mexican Bureau of Investigation and National Security (CISEN) report the following:

Mario Marín Torres is known to be in the habit of hiring escorts for private functions. There is evidence confirming his various romantic interests as well as his relationship with a minor. Marín has met with Kamel Nacif on two occasions in the city of London, England, where he is being monitored by the authorities. Possible ties to businessmen involved in acts of fraud. Of the several straw owners he makes use of, three are individuals who are under investigation. He is known to have a penchant for underage women. His right-hand man, Javier García Ramírez, has an active arrest warrant against him for illicit gain. Mario Marín and Valentín Meneses made a transaction with the Spanish company OHL for nearly 5.66 billion euros; fraud was detected. Valentín Meneses was sworn in as Secretary of Transportation while simultaneously drawing a salary as an advisor to OHL. The organization Pueblos En Defensa De La Tierra Y El Agua [Towns for the Protection of the Earth and Water] has initiated a lawsuit and will seek damages from Mario Plutarco Marín Torres and Valentín Meneses. The portion of Mario Marín’s personal wealth held in his son’s name is 15 billion pesos.

There is an information sheet attached to the file for the case that SEIDO currently has open on Mario Marín Torres and Mario Marín García, which reads:

During the period when Mario Plutarco Marín Torres (MPMT) was in office, fraudulent public works projects proliferated throughout the state. The Tetela de Ocampo, Izúcar de Matamoros, and Cuetzalan public hospitals were inaugurated but unusable, because they had been built without plumbing, potable water, electricity, or equipment. The Pahuatlán and Ahuacatlán hospitals were built on top of PEMEX²⁴²⁴ pipes and below high-tension wires. The federal government, through the Special Unit for the Investigation of Operations Involving Illicitly Acquired Funds (UEIORPI) joined together all its separate files, and the Federal Public Ministry agent assigned to the Assistant Attorney General’s Office for Special Investigations on Organized Crime (SEIDO) submitted evidence at the beginning of the year that attests to illicit gains on the part of Mario Marín Torres and eight other individuals to the judge at the Twelfth District Court for Federal Criminal Cases of Mexico City, as part of Criminal Case Number 6/2012. Currently (March 2013), the Comptroller General’s Office reports having initiated 187 legal proceedings against public servants operating under the direction of MPMT in the state of Puebla.

Translator’s Note: Petroleos México, Mexico’s state-owned oil company.

THE DEVIL IN DANGER

On July 18, 2012, rumors began to circulate that Succar, whom the other prisoners had nicknamed “The Devil,” had died in Altiplano, the high-security prison in Toluca. That same day, the press published a note by the news agency APRO.

CANCUN, Q. Roo (APRO)—The Lebanese businessman Jean Succar Kuri, who is currently serving a 112-year prison sentence for pedophilia and trafficking of minors, left the Altiplano maximum security prison facility last Sunday and was admitted to Adolfo López Mateos regional hospital in Toluca, in the State of Mexico, for reasons of renal insufficiency. 68-year-old Jean Thouma Hanna Succar Kuri, alias “El Johnny,” was released today; his return to prison was scheduled for later in the day.

Prison authorities confirmed that Succar was suffering from serious prostate trouble but noted that he was receiving medical attention and had full access to his medications. Despite having proven himself to be a dangerous prisoner, his lawyers were attempting to remove him from the high-security prison where he was being held under strict watch, insisting that for reasons of age and health, he should be allowed to serve out the remainder of his sentence at his beachside villa development in Cancun. My sources inside the prison told me that “El Johnny” was afraid of the other prisoners, who tormented him constantly, that his family no longer came to visit him, and that he was deeply depressed.

FLEE TOWARD LIFE

The end of 2012 found me meeting with specialists to work out how I might be able to return home after having fled suddenly in the face of a death threat that crackled down the line to me through a voice scrambler attached to a type of radiotelephone only drug cartel bosses have access to. I had learned some time ago that death threats serve two purposes. The first is to allow criminals the opportunity to revel in the thought of their murderous act. The anticipatory pleasure that contract killers experience is something like what a hungry hyena feels when it catches the scent of fear on the air. The second is to make victims emotionally unstable, to prompt individual self-censorship as well as censorship on a collective scale. I can’t remember how many times I’ve heard press directors tell me that when they send reporters into the field to cover certain stories, the latter retort, “And what if the same thing happens to me as happened to Lydia Cacho?” What they are really asking is if they are persecuted or jailed, who will protect them.

I was in Veracruz, working on tracking down information about a pedophiliac priest involved in a child pornography network; that trip was the last time I ever saw Veracruz journalist Miguel Ángel López, whom everyone called Milo. He had told me that he’d received new threats but that he felt he could no longer continue obeying his fear and leaving the state at the drop of a hat every time someone warned him he was going to die. He and I had spoken precisely about how expensive it is to be moving constantly from place to place. On June 20, 2011, a colleague of mine telephoned me, crying. Hired gunmen had just murdered Milo, along with his wife and his youngest child, a professional photographer who, like his father, worked at the Veracruz newspaper Notiver. Two other colleagues of mine, Gabriel Huge and Guillermo Luna, who had also received threats and with whom I’d previously compared notes on security strategies, fled Veracruz immediately. Milo’s murder reminded them that threats are part of a deadly game and must not be ignored. The ARTICLE 19 lawyers, who were Gabriel and Guillermo’s legal representatives as well as my own, helped the two men get to a safe location outside Veracruz.

Almost nobody stops to think about the enormous emotional and financial costs involved in working as a journalist under these conditions. Emotional instability prompts health problems; some turn to alcohol in order to be able to sleep at night, others take drugs, and still others use tranquilizers to help them withstand their depression and anxiety. Leaving your home and relocating, sometimes with nothing more than the clothes on your back or one small suitcase, leaving behind your family, small children, and pets—it all adds a little more to your overall state of fatigue. In fact, those who threaten us manage to make us feel what a fugitive on the lam must experience—the sensation of having one’s world turned upside down. A dear colleague of mine asked me to go to Milo’s burial in Veracruz, to help buck up all our fellow journalists there who were now feeling so vulnerable. But my health once again prevented me from traveling. I went up to my study and lit a candle, and I thought about all the work still left to be done, about my colleagues throughout the country who continue to work with great diligence and astuteness for meager pay. We need strength, I repeated to myself like a mantra. I looked at several photos of Gabriel and “Memo,” two young men chock full of convictions, and I hoped with all my heart that they would be safe, that what had happened to Milo and his son would not happen to them.

It was April 28, 2012, and I had finally found the time to celebrate my forty-ninth birthday, at a restful getaway at Bacalar Lagoon with some friends. My telephone rang. The voice on the other end stammered, barely able to get the words out.

“They killed her, they killed Regina, right in her very own home.”

Regina Martínez was an indigenous Totonac,²⁵²⁵ a rather shy woman who was never without her tape recorder, her notebook, and a black pen and who had the habit of adjusting her glasses periodically, almost like a nervous tic, whenever she was especially focused during an interview. For years, she had been La Jornada’s correspondent in Veracruz, and like all good reporters in Mexico, she moonlighted in the local press to make ends meet; at the time of her death, she was working as a correspondent for Proceso. She was found murdered in her home, severely beaten.

Translator’s Note: The Totonacs are an indigenous people now residing mainly in the Mexican states of Puebla and Veracruz.

From 2000 to 2011, seventy-seven journalists were violently assassinated by criminal organizations.

In more recent months, these same groups have killed fifteen reporters, “disappeared” three others, and used firearms or explosives to attack nineteen radio and newspaper offices. We know that a large portion of these attacks against journalists were perpetrated by agents of the state—governors, mayors, police officers, and members of the military who start to squirm whenever they are confronted with truthful reporting. None of us could forget the fact that Regina’s was the fifth murder of a journalist in Veracruz during Javier Duarte’s²⁶²⁶ tenure in office, or that thirteen other journalists had fled the state as a consequence of death threats or censorship. Regina’s final piece for Proceso read: “9 Police Officers with Ties to Narcotrafficking Arrested in Veracruz” and “Alleged Top Hit Man ‘Comandante Tere’ Captured in Veracruz.”

Translator’s Note: Javier Duarte has served as governor of the state of Veracruz since 2010.

Then on May 3, 2012, having since returned home following what they thought was an appropriate absence after reporting the threats made against them, Gabriel and Guillermo were found dead. Their lifeless bodies, displaying signs of torture, had been dismembered, just as the individuals who’d threatened them said they would be. I didn’t have the strength to attend the funeral. It was months earlier that the ARTICLE 19 lawyers helped them flee after the two were jailed and tortured for five hours by a group of militarized individuals within the Federal Police force seeking to dissuade them from sticking their noses into the so-called War on Narcotrafficking with their investigations.

The Organization of American States (OAS) had been alerted to the threats, having received reports from ARTICLE 19 as well as from Carlos Lauría of the Center for the Protection of Journalists, in New York, highlighting the oft-overlooked phenomenon of journalists being forcibly displaced in Mexico. Neither the two Veracruz journalists nor I had much trust in our own country’s authorities.

In recent years, I have met with some twenty newspaper directors throughout Mexico. The majority of them have stressed that they are proud to head offices where women make up more than 50 percent of their reporting and editing staff. They emphasize the importance of these women’s work, their sense of responsibility and strong work ethic, their sensitivity, and how they bring a unique perspective to the news. Perhaps, they say, they are more empathetic because they are mothers, or because they are women. I believe that the ability to practice ethical journalism is not a question of gender—there are just as many good or bad journalists among the ranks of each of the sexes. But the reality is that in a sexist country, women who become involved in serious investigative journalism lay their lives and freedom on the line in different ways than men. Violence against female journalists invariably takes on an added layer of misogynistic spite. It is likewise true that many women who rebel against sexism and machismo do write from a distinct perspective than men; there is a sort of understanding of differences that filters down to their investigations and the ways they report on and connect with the female victims they are interviewing.

In Felipe Calderon’s 2006–2012 term alone, forty-five members of the press were murdered. In my mind’s eye, every one of them has a face, a name. I knew many of their voices, I had laughed with some of them, admired their written, radio, or photojournalism work; we’d done tequila shots and drunk beer together, we’d buoyed each other’s spirits in times of hardship, we’d shared information and tips. We’d exchanged our knowing, local-reporter glances during forums on freedom of expression; we’d read each other’s work voraciously, because we’d all come to realize that we belong to a tribe of like-minded individuals working in search of truth and freedom of speech. Being a local reporter is nothing at all like being a high-profile journalist in the capital city.

The day Regina died, I went up to my room; I needed to be alone. My thoughts wandered to a Luis Eduardo Auté song, and before I knew it, I was looking it up on my iPod. What can we do? my colleagues and I kept asking ourselves. And I was at a loss to make any sort of reply. Listening to the song helped me to cry; then I sat down to write my column dedicated to Regina. What can we do when being ourselves is like being in a horror film . . . what can we do when success means killing the underdog, what can we do when imposters don’t even need to wear masks. Flee, perhaps—flee toward life. Live, perhaps—live in flight.

No, we are not going to our deaths, as some people believe. We are fleeing toward life, because we defend our right to live in a free country. We live in flight, as the poet says, because one’s own individual freedom cannot truly and realistically be defended if the freedom of others is not protected as well, and we defend all people’s right to know and understand the realities that surround them, and to denounce them when necessary. It’s our job, but it is also our professional mission, our calling. And somewhere along the way, in the face of such extreme levels of violence, journalism became a part of our lives—it is our life today—because our profession conditions our way of being in the world, and surviving in it.

A STEP FORWARD

At seven in the evening on January 30, 2013, while I was up in my study, hard at work on a new book, I got the news that the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation had ruled in my favor in the most recent case brought against me by the child trafficking mafias, a case that had begun as a civil suit back in 2008. Sitting next to me at the time was my dog Luna, a Rottweiler with an uncanny ability to sense shifts in my emotions. When she heard my voice, she immediately pricked up and began licking my hand, searching out my eyes with hers.

Supreme Court justice Arturo Zaldívar stated in his ruling that “in this case, the author Lydia Cacho Ribeiro and the publishing house Random House Mondadori are absolved of all responsibility for damages,” for the plain reason that the contents of my book The Demons of Eden place the general public interest above the private interests of businessmen. I started jumping up and down in my study like a schoolgirl, weeping tears of joy and babbling a mile a minute to my dog, who couldn’t tell whether I was extremely happy or had simply gone crazy. I lost count of how many times I exclaimed out loud, “A precedent for freedom of the press in Mexico, we’ve set a precedent for freedom of the press in Mexico!” I called my father, my sister, and my friend Joe, who had been taking care of me and keeping me company in my worst moments of sickness for the past several months. I spoke to the director at my publisher, Random House, and my lawyers at ARTICLE 19. We all agreed—this called for tequila.

Justice Zaldívar wrote the following in his final sentence:

On the one hand, the matter of a crime having been committed by a criminal organization is a matter of maximum public interest (recall, as regards this, that the information revealed in the aforementioned book [The Demons of Eden] made it possible to form a clear picture of the consequences that pedophilia and child prostitution have on their victims, as well as of the collusion of the economic and political actors that allow these acts to be committed with impunity); on the other hand, this specific instance of invasion of privacy was not particularly extreme, given the measures taken by the journalist to avoid revealing the identity of the individual in question, who is widely known among the general public, having come to occupy a position of notoriety in large part as a consequence of his own conduct.

The Supreme Court was acknowledging, for the second time in two years, that the crimes I denounced in The Demons of Eden are real, that in keeping with my responsibilities as a journalist, I made proper use of pseudonyms to avoid revealing victims’ identities as well as including black bars in photographs to cover the faces of the innocent people who had provided evidence regarding the facts in the case, that is, evidence of the transportation of the victim from Cancun to Los Angeles. It was never my intention to write a book about human trafficking or child pornography without fingering the culprits; they are and indeed ought to be the focus of the story. Many powerful criminals use the justice system to silence the press, and every successful case against such crooked individuals represents a collective achievement.

And this is true the world over. From Mexico to Guatemala, the United States, Turkey, and the United Kingdom, hundreds of journalists are currently facing civil suits brought against them by individuals who first commit crimes and then, upon discovering that good reporting has begun to shed unwanted light on their activities, turn to the courts to accuse those journalists of unlawfully exposing their private lives. The judge must then weigh all the different factors in the case and make a final assessment, but above all, she or he must determine if the journalist’s work sought to inform society about some real danger or violation of human rights. I am not the first journalist—nor will I be the last—to be jailed and persecuted for bringing to light a truth that ought to be publicly known. In fact, many have had even worse experiences than I, but it is important to make clear that every time a precedent is set in these cases, we all take a step forward—we reinforce the notion that those who are in positions of power and are discovered to be breaking the law must not be permitted to use the justice system as a tool of retaliation to punish those of us who point the finger at them.

In December 2012, Enrique Peña Nieto was sworn in as president of Mexico. With him, some of the country’s most recalcitrant politicians—former participants in the seventy-year-long government monopoly that appeared to have ended when the PAN’s Vicente Fox acceded to the presidency in 2000—returned to power. At the end of that brief, proto-democratic period, Fox was succeeded by Felipe Calderón, an ambitious economist who quickly discovered his Napoleonic side and a passion for war and authoritarianism. With the help of Barack Obama, who supplied him with the necessary cash and weapons, he plunged Mexico into a bloodbath, an unjustified war that has exacted a toll of more than fifty thousand deaths and several thousands of forced disappearances of people young and old. And all without putting the slightest dent in the operations of the drug cartels, the volume of their output, or the movement of drugs to end consumers in the United States. All wars create conditions that make human rights violations more likely to occur, but it is those wars that aim to supplant the very justice system that are the most brutal of all, because they weaken society and the state itself. This drug war, dreamed up in Washington and given an obedient stamp of approval by President Calderón, has strengthened the mafias, and it has created a wartime discourse of hatred and anger, of revelry in death. Whoever kills the most has the most power, media outlets loyal to Calderón seemed to be telling the country. This active promotion of war inspired thousands of young people to turn to contract killing and drug trafficking as a way of life, as an act of rebellion against a violent state and a violent society that, from their perspective, consign them to a life spent wasting away in ghettos of poverty. Their newly chosen governing elite, the drug bosses, take on the role of the state—they offer them jobs, wellbeing, protection, and power. There is no justice in war, only revenge and the colonization of both territory and minds; thousands of young people found a calling, found direction for their lives in this warlike discourse, in rebelling against a weak, inoperative state that so often ignores them.

A fierce contest ensued among the cartels, which now began vying with each other to co-opt public servants in an effort to infiltrate every police force and government department in the country. Women and children became the main spoils of war. There were no winners in this conflict, we all lost, but the biggest losers of all were the children—unprotected, fearful, and abused. As this book was being completed in 2013, the renowned and valiant journalist Adela Navarro, director of the weekly newspaper Zeta [which translates as “Zee”], declared that the issue of greatest importance, the issue most deserving of scrutiny during the first one hundred days of Peña Nieto’s presidency, was the PRI’s shutting down of access to information. In some cases, there is no access to information, and in others, information is being falsified. Adela explains,

As we were preparing this information, for instance, in the case of Baja California, where Zeta has its head office, the National Secretary General’s Office quotes 15 homicides, while a sum of daily police counts in these first 100 days yields 59. Seeing the disparity in these numbers—between what the government is telling us and what the reality on the ground is—we decided to consult with other papers in other states. Research and collaboration with various government institutions and journalism organizations in different states around the country allowed us to compile the following statistics: 4,549 murders were committed in Peña Nieto’s first 100 days, and high-intensity violence is most prevalent in the states of Guerrero, with 463 murders, Chihuahua, with 417, Mexico State, with 407, Jalisco, with 372, and Sinaloa, with 324.

The PRI is back and will govern until 2018, and its old ways and wiles are back, too. PRI governors control 90 percent of the thirty-two states that make up the Mexican Republic. You can already catch a whiff of that old, familiar pro-presidential connivance in the country’s main newspapers. Large sums of money go to perpetuating the soap-opera-heartthrob image President Peña Nieto has cultivated since the outset of his campaign. Human rights, especially the rights of women and children, are not and have never been an important part of Peña Nieto’s political agenda; prior to becoming president, he served as governor of Mexico State, where femicide rates rose while the justice system’s responsiveness to women and children’s went by the wayside.

Some of the men I have exposed in my investigations, men who continue to take part in the tangled webs of human trafficking mafias, drug cartels, and money laundering outfits, are now proudly ensconced at the new president’s side, secure in their political immunity. We may never manage to bring them to justice, but by keeping close tabs on them, we can prevent them from strengthening their protection of these networks that bring such harm upon the women and children of Mexico.

I have identified and reported the complete, true names of a hundred human traffickers, narcotraffickers, and corrupt politicians. I have published their stories and given voice to their victims. The most recent threats I received were from Raúl Martins, a former Argentinian Secret Service agent whose story I laid out in Slaves of Power. Martins has been named by the teenagers who were bought and sexually exploited in his brothels in Argentina, Cancun, and Playa del Carmen. His case has now reached the courts. A colleague came to me recently to tell me that she had been at one of Martins’s table dance clubs. He warned her there, “If you know that Lydia Cacho, tell her to shut her mouth. Her days are numbered, and when she least expects it, she’s gonna turn up dead.”

I understand that sometimes an enemy made is an enemy for life. The truth is that when our work succeeds, theirs becomes more difficult, if not impossible. Our journalistic success is their disgrace, and that fact, as my lawyers have explained to me, could spell my death sentence. I hope that I can continue to dodge any and all of the bullets meant for me, but should that prove not to be the case, at least I know with certainty that I am proud of my life and my professionalism. I have loved and I have been loved, I have danced and laughed until sunup. I have had whole days and nights filled with a happiness I hope all human beings can one day experience. I had a dysfunctional childhood but a loving one, with a roof over my head, education, food, and play. A childhood like that is the minimum standard I hope will be secured for every child the world over. Because the little girl who still resides within me knows that all girls deserve loving protection, a bright light to lead the way, education, and the right to dream and be free. It is only in a life steeped in freedom and love that such rights can be defended past childhood, into adulthood, and until the day we die.

BY WAY OF GOOD-BYE

The calendar on my desk is flipped open to 2013, and as I pen the final lines to this book, I gaze at the photographs of the children who have finally, after so many years, been able to put that fateful year of 2004 behind them, a year we all felt sure we would never be able to move past.

One of them has just completed her pre-university program and is studying to become a psychologist. She would like to open a free psychology clinic for girls.

One young man, one of the two male victims who still keep in touch with me, is halfway through a technical degree, still deciding whether he wants to work as a hotelier or at an airline. He has a girlfriend, and he speaks to her often about children’s rights and the importance of taking good care of society’s youngest.

Another young woman lives in Mérida. She has completed her counseling and now, nine years later, is convinced she has overcome the worst of the trauma she experienced as a result of having been sexually exploited for four years, beginning at the age of six. She has overcome her phobias and is romantically involved with someone. She wants to be a chef and says that she is truly a full-time survivor at last, a victim never more.

Another is studying social work in Monterrey. She hopes to use her experience as a survivor to help other women, although she desires never to speak of the past again. She explains how she buried her past one day, in a little wooden box containing burned papers and a photograph of Succar, her tormentor, taken the day he was sentenced to 113 years in prison.

One woman has returned to the same networks she escaped as a child. Now an adult, she works for a Tijuana madam who runs a VIP escort service. That’s the last I heard of her, a few years back now. “I hate men, they used me, so now I’m going to use them,” she said in the painful final letter she wrote to tell me that it meant nothing to her that Succar had been sentenced.

Another young girl who had been progressing very well in her therapy sessions was taken to Mérida by her uncle, a move that went against the warnings in the girl’s list of special care requirements. These guidelines are vital to her wellbeing because of the depth of the trauma she suffered, since she was extremely young when she was exploited and forced to take part in the creation of pornographic films. The last I heard, her uncle had been looking for help and was offered the chance for her to continue her therapy in another state in the country; the girl says her uncle moved her because Succar gave him 600,000 pesos to get her out of Cancun so that she couldn’t testify against him.

I could fill a hundred pages with the success stories of the girls and boys who have changed their lives with the help of social, therapeutic, educational, emotional, and legal support, and not just in Mexico but all over the world—in the United States, for instance, where the organization GEMS (Girls’ Educational and Mentoring Services) rescues women and girls and helps them to heal and to transform their lives.

It must be acknowledged that some girls and boys do end up getting left behind. They may develop severe personality disorders as a result of the abuses suffered in their childhoods. They learn to hate and distrust everyone; they don’t understand the meaning of unconditional love. Sadly, some of these young people lack the wherewithal to switch on that inner resilience that others are able to rely on. There is still much to be learned in terms of how forced participation in child pornography and other forms of violent and degrading treatment affect the psycho-emotional and psycho-sexual health of their victims. But I have seen with my own eyes, from Kyrgyzstan to Cambodia, from Mexico to the United States, from Argentina to Sweden, Russia, and the United Kingdom, that there are growing numbers of groups developing ever better methods for the rescue and proper recovery of these victims, and that men are increasingly becoming involved in the prevention of these sorts of crimes. I have seen how giving a name to the pain an individual is experiencing can give that person a renewed sense of self and self-worth.

Traditionally, charitable organizations have tended to pressure victims into taking steps the latter are not yet prepared for, but these old models are now becoming obsolete. And a great deal of work remains to be done in order to demonstrate to society how pushes by the commercial sex industry and certain prostitution advocacy groups can in fact jeopardize the rights of girls and young women through the use of campaigns aimed at normalizing the practices of teenage prostitution and pornography.

Just as in the Wachowskis’ film, we must take our daughters and sons by the hand and help them to discover the Matrix, or, in other words, the value system that prizes mistreatment and abuse. This real-life Matrix is not an unshakable reality. Like the character Neo, whom I discussed at the beginning of this book, we can learn to see with new eyes and build a new freedom, one far removed from any type of ideological, sexual, or political slavery.

The challenges are enormous, but they are commensurate with the achievements to be made. One of the greatest tasks is to ensure that governments across the globe, the Mexican government included, understand that they are duty-bound to be on the side of society, on the side of children, and not the mafias. It is for this reason that it is so vital for us to continue to investigate these individuals, to continue to identify all those who contrive to commit acts of sexual violence against girls, boys, and young adults, either directly or through political alliances, because it is they who are perpetuating the “manufacturing” of new aggressors and exploiters.

At some point before the close of 2013, my case will be brought before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in Washington, and we will await the sentence.

Perhaps, as is the case for millions of others, justice will not come in time for me, Lydia Cacho. But it is worth the effort to try; it is worth the effort to shed light on the wreckage of this country, this world we seek to transform. Because if we have learned anything over the course of these past ten years of persecutions, threats, and trials, it is that true triumph does not consist of seeing the fruits of our own personal efforts but rather of ensuring that our time spent on this earth will allow others to reap the seeds sown by our perseverance.

Democracy and human rights are not unmoving goals but instead constitute a living process, a life-form that requires consistency, access to information, passion, and patience if it is to survive and thrive.

Journalism, as a Spanish friend once explained, is not the fourth estate. Good journalism is in fact a counterweight. A stalwart presence, it does not shrink in the face of the crushing resilience of the patriarchy, it does not submit to official discourses, it does not bend to corruption. But above all, the variety of journalism that best serves society is that which does not churn its profits from flattery and scandal but works to analyze and clarify a multiplicity of truths and acknowledge every person’s humanity. Good journalism creates democratic balance by giving real weight to voices that would otherwise be silenced by the overwhelming power of those who control politics, the economy, and all that is born of them. I believe that as Carol Gilligan said, “the opposite of patriarchy is democracy rooted in voice, not violence.”

We must continue to ask questions, to search for answers, and to join forces against corruption, impunity, slavery, and injustice in every corner of the planet, until not one single girl or boy remains lost in the shadows of a society that looks silently on rapists, that looks silently on the blindness of a judicial system that is incapable of understanding for once and for all that every abused girl is at risk of turning into an abusive adult or a perennial victim, that every abused boy could in turn grow up to become an abuser, or a Supreme Court justice with a heart full of hate, or a fearful, unhappy man.

We do not yet know whether we will win our case at the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights; in the meantime, there are two important achievements that nobody can take away from me. The first is having survived in the face of so many forms of violence with my sense of hope intact and my sense of dignity redoubled, for I give no credence to the notion of penitence through suffering. Rather, I believe in standing up for freedom and my right to live happily in the company of my loved ones. The other is knowing that I have fulfilled my promise to the girls and boys who were abused by this loathsome network. Their captor is in prison and will never be let out. Now they can sleep soundly; the reign of terror has ended, just as it must end for all the girls and boys in this world. Because arresting one pedophile is all well and good, but preventing our societies from continuing to create them is the real cultural battle of our century.

21.   Translator’s Note: An episode in Mexico’s Dirty War that took place ten days before the opening of the Mexico City Summer Olympics, on October 2, 1968, in which an as-yet-unconfirmed number of civilians (estimated variously at anywhere between thirty and three hundred) died at the hands of security forces near the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in the Tlatlecolco district of the nation’s capital city.

22.   In March of 1857, the Supreme Court of the United States, headed by Justice Roger B. Taney, declared that all individuals of black race—both slaves and free persons—were not and could never be citizens of the United States. The court also declared the Missouri Compromise of 1820 to be unconstitutional, thereby allowing slavery to continue in every territory of the country.

23.   Translator’s Note: The Mérida Initiative is a security cooperation agreement between the governments of the United States, Mexico, and the Central American countries. Its purpose is to combat the interrelated problems of organized crime, money laundering, and drug trafficking.

24.   Translator’s Note: Petroleos México, Mexico’s state-owned oil company.

25.   Translator’s Note: The Totonacs are an indigenous people now residing mainly in the Mexican states of Puebla and Veracruz.

26.   Translator’s Note: Javier Duarte has served as governor of the state of Veracruz since 2010.