One night in 1999, I was preparing to leave the offices of the magazine where I worked as editor in chief in Cancun, Mexico. My boss had gone home a short while earlier, and my secretary was waiting for me at my car. I had just activated the building’s alarm and closed the door when, on turning around, I suddenly found myself face to face with a man I thought I recognized. He pressed a gun to my forehead, and exhaling a bitter stench of tobacco as he spoke, he said that if I stuck my nose into his private life again, I’d be dead. Then he turned on his heel and walked away. My blood had turned to ice. I got in the car, trying to decide how best to respond, what the most appropriate course of action would be. There was no good answer. Threatening someone with death—even at gunpoint—is not a crime in Mexico. The man with the gun didn’t want to kill me, he just wanted to let me know that he could. He was the owner of a brothel that masqueraded as a tropical dance club. He had a sort of bunker there where he was holding a group of young Cuban women against their will. I had published an article about it in a Cancun newspaper a few months earlier, prompting the Mexican authorities to close the club and the Cuban authorities—who were colluding in the temporary “migration” of exploited dancers—to cut their ties to this well-known local businessman and lawyer.
This individual considered his business-cum-criminal life a private matter, as do thousands of those who exploit women and young girls and boys all over the world. On several occasions since that night, I have faced armed men seeking to silence me with threats, violence, attempts on my life, even jail. So far none have managed to silence me. I have investigated all manner of mafias throughout my career as a journalist, writer, and defender of human rights. The deaths of esteemed colleagues have marked the passing years, and their bravery is a daily inspiration to me. I have been kidnapped, jailed, and persecuted for many years. My life is in danger today, as are the lives of the majority of those colleagues of mine who rebel against impunity and violence. My story is relevant because I am one of thousands of activists and journalists who refuse to stand silently by in the face of such atrocities as child pornography, human trafficking, the sale of weapons to hired teenage assassins, or the murder of journalists working to ensure that their societies understand the circumstances that are changing or even destroying them.
The story you hold in your hands is the biography of a complex life where love and esteem are ever-present, as are hate, extreme violence, and even death. In this book, you will find an accurate, in-depth analysis of the mafiosos who orchestrate the sale and purchase of young girls and have confessed their crimes as producers of child pornography as well as their ties to powerful politicians in Mexico, the United States, and the rest of the world. You will hear the words of those who tried to kill me for having given voice to the girls and boys who managed to escape their networks of abuse. You will learn who these small Latin American children bought and sold in Mexico are. But you will also discover the bravery of these young survivors, you will discover shared human compassion and the will to change an entire country, and you will discover how tragedy can become an instrument of social transformation.
One afternoon, I was watching the first Matrix film with a group of teenagers in the shelter I founded in Cancun for the protection of women and children. I like to use this movie when working with young people in order to discuss how we all have to make decisions and accept consequences. In the film, intelligent machines have come to enslave humans in order to exploit their vast stores of vital energy. Because it would be far too cumbersome to keep the entire human population as slaves if its individuals were aware of their situation, the machines create the Matrix, a prefabricated virtual reality within which people live, deluded as to their true condition. For the enslaved humans, the matrix they live in is an unshakable reality where happiness depends on following the rules. The character Morpheus manages to awaken the protagonist, Neo, from this virtual reality. In his confusion, Neo attempts to mount a resistance within the preexisting context, but Morpheus reminds him that he was raised in an intangible prison he can neither see, nor smell, nor touch. This prison is in the mind, and that is the genius of the Matrix. Neo’s task, his challenge, is to learn to understand freedom from within a different paradigm than the one he has been exposed to since he was a boy; he must transform reality and his way of looking at the world in order to free himself and others.
Reality is erected upon human experience, upon our conception of the world, and this conception is fluid: it is constantly changing and transforming. Once we understand that the cultural matrix we were brought up in is a prison backed by patriarchal powers, a prison that generates abuse, violence, and slavery, we have two choices: Those of us who seek a pattern of social interaction not based on the abuse of others, who desire freedom without violence, can unite; or we can submit to those who tell us that there is no freedom without violence. I chose the first path, and I have accepted the consequences.
In reality, the “Lydia Cacho cause,” as writer Roberto Saviano has dubbed it, represents the efforts and sacrifice of a large number of individuals working to build a world free from violence. But because this cause befell me, my loved ones have also suffered threats, and they worry along with me. The violence unleashed in the wake of my book The Demons of Eden: The Powers Protecting Child Pornography, which exposed networks of power in the political and business worlds, has most definitely extended to the brave journalists whose selflessness prevented the triumph of campaigns on the part of these same networks to distort or bury my findings. The bravery of the upright government workers, congresswomen and men, lawyers, and judges who put their jobs on the line in order to defend their ethical convictions and stand in support of justice for the victims of child abuse is likewise commendable. I wrote the first half of this text at a time of anxiety and desperation, when I was locked in a judicial battle against state governor Mario Marín and Kamel Nacif, two men who were protecting the head of a child pornography and money laundering ring that was in turn backed by powerful lawyers, politicians, and businessmen with connections that can be traced all the way up to the presidency of Felipe Calderón. Now, years later, I am taking up these memoirs again, ahead of my appearance at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, with clear evidence about how and where these people are living, these people who created such a horrific trail of abuse, corruption, and death, these people who are so vilely in debt to society. Many are the lessons I have learned.
Before she died, my mother made me promise that I would never open the door to spite or anger, that no matter how much suffering I faced, I would remember that my task—in journalism, in activism, and in my family life—is to build. And peace, she explained to me, can only be built when we are moved and inspired by the desire for a free and happy life for ourselves and the whole of humanity.
“They want fear to control you, my daughter,” she told me, “but you must use hope and dignity to control it; you must not allow your spirit to be colonized by anger or hatred, because these things will blind you.” My mother could never have imagined how powerful the mafias her daughter would find herself confronting would be, but her lessons have helped me to remain strong, even if I have to spend the rest of my life fleeing my enemies, these powerful mafias that buy, sell, and abuse young girls and women.
I have learned during my many years of persecution that freedom, as Octavio Paz wrote, is not simply the ability to do whatever one likes; rather it is being able to make a decision—yes or no—and to accept the consequences of that decision. I am, therefore, and despite the circumstances, a free woman—a free woman in an oppressive Mexico, where the rule of law is not a reality but merely a pipe dream.
For my mother, for myself, and for all women. This is what I say to myself every morning when I wake up. With this book I have placed in your hands, I am crossing over into new territory, possessed of the most powerful tools at my disposal: truth, freedom of speech, and proof.
Lydia Cacho
February 2016