Mario Marín, the former governor of Puebla state, has been arrested on charges that he ordered the illegal arrest and torture of a prominent reporter who investigated his protection of a paedophile ring.
In 2005, reporter Lydia Cacho published a book, The Demons of Eden, which implicated many wealthy businessmen in a pedophile ring. According to Justice in Mexico, the book “exposed the protection that businessmen Jean Succar Kuri and José Kamel Nacif were receiving from politicians and other businessmen when they were accused of creating a prostitution and child pornography ring.” Months after he took office as governor, Marín sent police from Puebla to arrest Cacho in Cancún on defamation charges.
After the police took her, Cacho said she was driven 20 hours to Puebla, where she claimed police taunted her, threatened her with rape and forced a gun into her mouth. At other points on the trip, it has been alleged, the police debated drowning her in the ocean somewhere along the Gulf of Mexico coast.
Marín was revealed to have arranged the torture over a recorded phone call where he said, “Yesterday I gave that old bitch a good old slap. She’s been going on and on, so let’s see whether she gets the message and learns her lesson.” Despite that damning evidence, it took 14 years for a Mexican judge to issue an arrest warrant in the case. In January 2019, the current Mexican administration publicly apologized to Cacho for her arbitrary arrest.
“The accomplices reunite again, but now in very different conditions,” Cacho wrote via Twitter on Thursday. “There’s no more luxury party, nor girls turned victims at the hands of the pederasts. There is no toast nor celebration. Journalism is the way toward justice.”