On Apr 13, 1:13�am, "bobandcarole" <bobandcarole1...@hotmail.com>
wrote:
> Mexican anti-pedophile crusader puts her life on the line
> By Manuel Roig-Franzia
>
> The Washington Post
>
> A bodyguard keeps watch as Lydia Cacho Ribeiro leaves the women's
> made against her. "This is my life," she says.
> At the women's center, Cacho Ribeiro examines a woman hurt in a
> domestic- violence incident.
>
> conspicuous with their handguns in lumpy fanny packs. The bulletproof
> SUV sits in quick-getaway position outside.
>
> And now Lydia Cacho Ribeiro's cellphone rings.
>
> "Yes, I got in OK," Cacho says from an out-of-the-way table. "I'm
> fine."
>
> Cacho sets the phone down with a weary smile.
>
> "He was worried," she says of her longtime partner, the prominent
> Mexican editor and columnist Jorge Zepeda Patterson. "This is my
> life."
>
> A crusade against pedophiles has made Cacho, recently honored by
> Amnesty International, one of Mexico's most celebrated and imperiled
> journalists. She is a target in a country where at least 17
> journalists have been killed in the past five years and that trailed
> only Iraq in media deaths during 2006.
>
> abuse and pornography rings flourishing amid the $500-a-night resorts
> Power That Protects Child Pornography" chronicles in cringe-inducing
> detail the alleged habits of wealthy men whose sexual tastes run to 4-
> year-old girls.
>
> The arrest
>
> Her book was just a middling seller, and her fight against child
> abusers was getting little attention until one afternoon in mid-
> December 2005 - the afternoon the cops showed up.
>
> On that day, Cacho says, police officers from the far-off state of
> Puebla shoved her into a van outside the women's center she runs on a
> crumbling side street. They drove her 950 miles across Mexico, she
> says, jamming gun barrels into her face and taunting her for 20 hours
> with threats that she would be drowned, raped or murdered. The police
> have disputed her version of events, saying she was treated well.
>
> Cacho found herself in police custody because Mexico's "Denim King,"
> textile magnate Kamel Nacif, had accused her of defamation, then a
> criminal offense. (Inspired by Cacho's case, the Mexican Congress
> recently passed a law decriminalizing defamation.) Cacho had written
> that Nacif used his influence to protect a suspected child molester,
> victims was certain Nacif also abused underage girls.
>
> Cacho had triggered her car alarm as she was being taken into custody,
> a predetermined signal to alert her staff to trouble. Friends
> suspected the men in uniform were only posing as police. E-mails and
> international human-rights groups.
>
> "There was so much fear," recalled Lucero Saldana, then a Mexican
> senator. "We were thinking there might have been an attempt on her
> life, that she might have been kidnapped."
>
> Saldana, taking no chances, was waiting when Cacho arrived at the jail
> in Puebla. She scrambled to arrange bail. But even a fired-up Mexican
> senator could not save Cacho from a humiliating strip search while a
> clutch of male officers loitered.
>
> After nearly half a day in jail, Cacho was free on bond, though
> rattled. She was soon to find out how highly placed her enemies were.
>
> Bombshell tapes
>
> Two months later, tapes started airing on Mexican radio stations,
> crude male voices spewing obscenities. It was clear the men were
> talking about Lydia Cacho. The tapes had been delivered anonymously to
> Mexico City newspaper and broadcast reporters. No one knows who made
> the recordings.
>
> In one conversation, presumably recorded the day of Cacho's arrest, an
> unidentified voice tells Nacif to pay "a woman in the jail to rape
> her."
>
> But the real blockbuster was on another tape.
>
> "My precious governor," Nacif can be heard saying.
>
> "My hero," another voice says.
>
> That second voice was unmistakable. It was Puebla Gov. Mario Marin, a
> stalwart of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which
> dominated Mexico for seven decades before losing its grip on the
> presidency in 2000.
>
> "Well, yesterday, I gave a [expletive] whack on the head to that old
> bitch," Marin tells Nacif.
>
> Nacif thanks his "precious governor" for ordering Cacho's arrest and
> says he will send Marin "a beautiful bottle of cognac."
>
> Marin acknowledged that the voice was his, but he said the recordings
> were taken out of context. His rebuttal had almost no impact. In the
> court of public opinion, the verdict was clear: Cacho was the victim
> of influence-peddling and a political vendetta.
>
> Cacho has since persuaded Mexico's Supreme Court to hear a human-
> rights complaint - the first such case involving a journalist. But in
> Mexico, where corruption and violence against women are rampant, there
> have been no repercussions for the central players.
>
> Still, with each new tape, commentators went wild, many calling for
> Marin's resignation. Satirists went even wilder. Almost overnight,
> performance artists took to stages to mock the governor, songs were
> composed and satiric cognac ads posted on the Internet.
>
> "For that very special occasion, to celebrate among friends, arrives
> the commemorative cognac 'My Precious Governor,' " begins one spoof.
> "My Precious Governor. So that you can become a good pedophile."
>
> Suddenly, Cacho was everywhere: the evening news, talk shows,
> newspaper front pages. Nacif and Marin, unwittingly, had made her a
> star.
>
> Lydia Cacho is 42 years old but looks younger. She keeps fit with a
> yoga regimen and favors tight jeans, spike-heel boots and plunging
> necklines.
>
> She also knows she doesn't fit the mold of a feminist expected by the
> old-style, "machismo"-dominated political system that she says
> infuriates her for neglecting women.
>
> "They think we're all ugly, fat, mustachioed feminists," said Cacho,
> who studied humanities at the Sorbonne and speaks four languages. "I
> don't have to dress like a man to demonstrate that I am
> intelligent. ... If they have a problem with my attractiveness, with
> my sexuality, that's their problem."
>
> Cacho's feminism sprouted in the "lost cities" outside Mexico City,
> the impoverished squatters' hells that developed in the 1960s and
> 1970s with almost no government regulation. She spent weekends as a
> child in the lost cities working on homespun social-aid programs with
> her mother, Paulette Ribeiro Monteiro, an early Mexican feminist who
> died four years ago.
>
> "Her passion comes from her mother," said Lucia Lagunes, director of a
> Mexico City news agency that focuses on women's issues. "Her mother
> taught her to have ideals and to fight for them."
>
> An intense career
>
> In more than two decades straddling activism and journalism, Cacho has
> run from angry drug dealers waving AK-47s because she sheltered their
> battered wives. She has been threatened too many times to count. She
> has held 20 people in her arms as they died, most of them clients of
> an AIDS shelter she founded.
>
> In 1999, she says, she was raped by a man in a bus-station bathroom.
>
> A friend in the prosecutor's office told her she was probably attacked
> as revenge for her social work and her newspaper columns. She decided
> not to pursue the case.
>
> "As a journalist before, I kept writing about the importance of filing
> reports with the police, and after the rape I learned that the main
> thing is to recover and to be protected and to be more sensitive to
> victims of violent crimes," Cacho wrote in an e-mail.
>
> In 2004, a journalist friend asked Cacho to co-write a book about a
> the authorities and said Succar, the multimillionaire hotel owner, had
> begun abusing her when she was 13. Others, including her sister, also
> had been molested, the young woman said.
>
> Pointing the finger
>
> Cacho spun an outline in days for a book that would not only allege
> Succar had abused more than 100 girls, but also accuse him of
> laundering money for organized crime and of being protected by
> powerful politicians.
>
> "Are you crazy?" she recalls her friend asking her.
>
> The friend, whose name she keeps secret for fear of repercussions,
> dropped out. Cacho started writing.
>
> "Demons of Eden" opens with a 13-year-old girl, whom Cacho calls
> "Cintia," clutching a stuffed animal as she tells a psychologist how
> Succar - the man she called "Uncle Johnny" - molested her at the age
> of 8. Afterward, Cintia says, he brandished a knife and threatened to
> cut her "into pieces." Cacho quotes the girl saying, "He is the
> devil."
>
> Cacho writes that Succar's victims suffer just as much after they
> approach authorities. A local prosecutor calls a news conference and
> distributes photographs of the girls, their addresses, their parents'
> names and even their cellphone numbers. A school "morals teacher"
> reveals that she knew about Succar's abuse for years but did nothing
> about it.
>
> Cacho writes of overhearing a group of male journalists speculating in
> a smoke-filled room about whether a 12-year-old could enjoy sex and
> commenting that "old Succar likes young meat."
>
> A key moment comes when Succar's first accuser, whom Cacho calls
> a hidden camera set in place by law-enforcement officials. In the
> video, Succar describes sex with 4-year-old girls as "my vice" and
> says he knows he is committing a crime.
>
> Armed with such damning evidence, Cacho says, the authorities do
> nothing, except tip off Succar. The heads-up gives him ample time in
> late 2003, she writes, to buy a first-class ticket to the United
> States, where he owns a Los Angeles mansion.
>
> Succar was arrested in Arizona in February 2004 and was extradited
> last July to Mexico, where he is being held in a maximum-security
> attorney, said in an interview that six of seven accusers have
> submitted signed affidavits recanting their testimony. He says Emma
> was not a minor when she had what he calls a consensual relationship
> with Succar.
>
> "Succar Kuri never abused a minor," Wenceslao says. The tapes, he
> says, were doctored by law-enforcement officials, whom he accuses of
> trying to extort $1 million from his client.
>
> Cacho says Succar bribed and pressured his accusers to sign papers
> recanting their allegations. Emma didn't want to sign, Cacho says,
> which indicates her abuser still can dominate her.
>
> "It's disgraceful"
>
> It's night in Mexico City and Cacho has slipped away from her
> bodyguards for a brief and increasingly rare taste of freedom. A
> waiter spreads shot glasses around the table at La Covadunga, the
> crowded and smoky hangout of Mexico City intellectuals where the
> clientele shout to be heard over the slap of dominoes on tabletops.
>
> Some of Cacho's rage at the pedophiles comes from her certainty that
> they rob victims of normal sex lives as adults. She writes of Emma
> struggling with sobbing fits when she tries to be intimate. Cintia,
> Cacho writes, wears four pairs of underwear since being molested by
> Succar.
>
> Despite Cacho's notoriety, Lagunes, the news-agency director, laments
> that child abuse still gets little attention in Mexico. The media
> focus on the political scandal spawned by her case rather than the
> estimated 20,000 children abused each year in Mexico.
>
> "It's disgraceful," Lagunes says.
>
> Cacho writes in her epilogue that "hundreds of Mexican girls are and
> continue to be tortured, violated and trained by powerful men to be
> sold and photographed."
>
> She is at work on a new book, this one focused on the trafficking of
> women and girls. She whispers that tomorrow she has a meeting with "a
> really good source." She raises her eyebrows in anticipation and rubs
> her hands together.
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