The Guardian, Saturday 1 September 2012
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| In Mexico we need good journalists. It’s important. I want to be there to see the change Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian |
Lydia Cacho is one of Mexico's most fearless journalists. Her investigations have led to attempts on her life, and now she has been forced to flee her country. What next?
In 2005, Lydia Cacho was approached by several police officers. They bundled her into a van and for the 20 hours it took to drive from Cancun in southern Mexico, where she lives, north to the city of Puebla she was, she says, "tortured". Sexual assault was threatened. A gun was pushed into her mouth. A sickening see-saw: "I kept thinking one minute I was going to die, then that I would survive."
When they arrived, a female guard told her she would be raped in jail. In fact, a network of friends, contacts and activists swung into action and she was bailed. Attempts on her life continued, and she has become well known as one of Mexico's bravest journalists. A recent estimate put the number killed there since 2006 at 67. Amid this, Cacho started work on her next book.
This story tells you several things about Cacho and the world she works in: alleged corruption (tapes surfaced that appeared to show her arrest was orchestrated by a man she had written about, alleging he had connections to a paedophile ring), the vulnerability of Mexico's journalists, and that Cacho is not somebody who can be silenced. Her new book, Slavery Inc: the Untold Story of International Sex Trafficking, is about to be published in the UK. Although she has lived with death threats for years, she took the most recent one four weeks ago seriously enough to leave the country.
Is Cacho frightened? If the question is obvious, the answer isn't. She sits across the table in an office in central London, utterly composed, an occasional flicker of rage behind dark eyes. "I think it's absurd," she says. "I'm telling the truth, I'm a good journalist and I have to flee my country." Later she says: "I don't scare easily." She has been offered asylum in several countries – not just on this occasion, but in the past – but has never wanted to take it. "I like my country. [In Mexico] really good journalists are so badly needed. It's important. I want to be there to see the change."
Is she prepared for how long she might have to stay away? A deep sigh. "I want to go back home, everything is there – my house, my dogs. I'm trying to find out who did it and expose them, which is the only thing I can do to save my life." She thinks this threat is related to her book, in which she names men who she says are involved in sex trafficking in Mexico.
She travels to some of the world's sex tourism centres to piece together her story on the thriving global sex trade, much of it told through the testimonies of women and children. She met children rescued from sex slavery in Cambodia and Guatemala. A North American woman who told her how her "employers" – she thought she would be working as a singer in a nightclub – confiscated her visa and plane ticket and over several days kept her prisoner in a hotel room where she was drugged and raped by dozens of men. A woman from Venezuela, who escaped her traffickers in Mexico, was able to identify numerous immigration officials either as clients or those who had facilitated the passage of girls flown into the country. Dressed as a nun in Mexico City – the only safe way, she decided, for a woman to walk its mafia-controlled areas – Cacho saw children working as prostitutes in motels.
Finding figures for the number of people trafficked and enslaved is notoriously difficult; in 2005, the International Labour Organisation said 2.4 million at any one time are trafficked into forced labour, with at least 43% of these forced to work in the sex industry, but it's a conservative estimate. "The point of the book was to understand how the international markets are connected," she says. "As a reporter, I was really frustrated, because every time I interviewed an expert, everyone kept telling me they're not linked, that this isn't an international business. But it is."
She was threatened throughout her research. "In Bangkok, I stayed in very nice hotels because it was the way to see the rich European clients who bring girls or boys to the hotel. I would be sitting in the bar, and have my camera with me, and someone would always come over, a waiter, saying, 'Be careful, don't do that, you're a journalist, right?' In Cambodia, I had to flee a casino and hide in my hotel." She tried to barricade herself into her room with furniture. "I thought it was clever." She laughs. "And then I thought: 'This is stupid, they have guns and I just have a chair against the door.'"
Before she started the investigation, Cacho says she was open to the idea of legalising and regulating prostitution, and had listened to many academics and feminists who advocated it. "Then the more I travelled, and the more women I interviewed, the more worried I got," she says. "I'm absolutely convinced that all forms of prostitution are just a way of normalising gender discrimination and violence against women, and women are 'trained' to become prostitutes because they are objects in a society that wants to have ghettoes of women who can be raped."
She adds she doesn't really believe women can "choose" to become a prostitute: "In order to make a choice, you really need to have opportunities and options. If you don't, you are not really choosing, you are just getting by." She says there isn't just the stereotypical idea of children and women who are abducted and enslaved (though these do, of course, exist); there are the women who are duped and find themselves owing thousands of dollars to the men who control them. Women, Cacho writes, who "have been conditioned to sell their bodies, and believe prostitution is the only way for them to make a living". In Cambodia, Cacho met a woman who runs a brothel who explained how she "reprograms" girls by "normalising sexual exploitation through systematic exposure to pornography. They have to be convinced that they were the ones who chose to do this, and they must be constantly reminded that their lives are worth nothing."
Even the women she met who were earning thousands of dollars, seemingly free to leave when they wanted, didn't convince her that sex work could be a rational and free labour choice. "After a while, when you get in depth in an interview, they start telling you how miserable they are, how they are mistreated by clients, how they hate the smell of them, or the way the clients behave. They start giving you little stories that are stories of violence."
She tries to knit together the links that stretch across the world. She met the former wife of a drug trafficker who described how young women were first exploited as prostitutes, then forced to work in their factories making illegal drugs, and how contacts were met in London, and were formed with gangs in Mexico and Cuba. Police in different countries have told her how many police, politicians and the judiciary are clients of brothels run by organised criminals. The tangle she portrays is overwhelming. The sex trade is growing, she says, in part "because politicians all over the world are not addressing poverty. They are not really improving the lives of women and girls."
One reason for the growth of pornography and prostitution, Cacho believes, is that while women's rights are improving in many places, "the culture of masculinity has not changed at all". The fact that there are men, she points out, from Europe and North America, who "go to Mexico, Venezuela, Cambodia, Thailand to have sex with women there is telling you something". She remembers a young man in Spain who explained he used prostitutes because he couldn't be bothered to talk to the women he met in his everyday life as equals. What she would love to see, she writes, is a "new masculine revolution … a new generation of men, not warriors, not armed, not threatening divine punishment, not violent, but men who possess a strong sense of progress and justice".
Cacho was born into a large family in Mexico City. Her father was an engineer, her French mother a psychologist who was involved in the feminist movement. "They way she saw the world was really enlightening for me," she says. "It was shocking to live in a house in which equality was really implemented every day with my brothers and sisters, and then go out in to a country that didn't respect the rights of women."
At 23, she became a reporter, and started writing about violence against women. "My editor said, 'This is good, stick to that.' I thought, yes, this is what I like doing." In 1999, a man followed her into the bathroom of a bus station in Cancun and inflicted a brutal attack, in which she was raped and had several bones broken – an attack, she believes, that was "punishment" for her work.
And so the threats continued, especially once she started trying to expose a paedophile ring in Cancun for her previous book, Demons of Eden (one of the men she wrote about, Jean Succar Kuri, was sentenced last year). For a time, she travelled in an armoured car and had federal bodyguards; she dispensed with them three years ago after her car was sabotaged. "I lost a lot of friends and I respected that – they said they didn't want to be seen with me in public. My social life changed dramatically. You learn how to walk the street and be looking all the time for signs of somebody coming, like a motorcycle."
The psychological toll is alleviated with therapy, yoga, and – until now – spending time in her garden with her dogs, "getting in touch with the earth, life. I have a sense of humour. A lot of people think I'm weird because I can laugh about the worst things that happen – not when they're happening, but afterwards. I think that's healthy. You get cynical if you can't laugh."
The risks are real. In April, her friend, the Mexican investigative journalist Regina Martinez, was killed. Anna Politkovskaya was also a friend; Cacho recalls they met two months before the Russian journalist was murdered in 2006. She searches for the words: "Reality. Shock."
The only thing to do is to keep working. (She can't stop – yesterday, she says, she was in her hotel room forwarding a Facebook page she believes is used by a paedophile ring to Interpol.) As well as her writing, she has founded a women's shelter in Cancun; last year, it provided refuge or psychological and legal help to 30,000 women fleeing abuse. Cacho never wanted to become the story, but the threats on her life also bring a spotlight to her work, and to the dangers faced by her colleagues. "I've never wanted a quiet life, otherwise I wouldn't be a reporter or an activist," she says.
"Of course, I get fed up with the politics and the corruption, but I never question my work. We are journalists because we want to change the world." She smiles. "I think my job has made a difference."
Slavery Inc: the Untold Story of International Sex Trafficking by Lydia Cacho is published on 6 September by Portobello Books, priced £14.99. Buy it for £11.99 at guardianbookshop.co.uk
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