Lydia Cacho: Justice for Mexico's Women Means the Right to Live in Safety Paul Imison - The independent
go to original May 31, 2013

Investigative journalist Lydia Cacho traces the increasing sophistication of sex traffickers, who she describes as having gone from simply abducting girls and women to "creating a pop culture of porn." (ForaTv)

Soon after Lydia Cacho, a Mexican investigative journalist, began reporting and publishing articles highlighting violence against women, she was raped at a Cancún bus station – a crime she believes was a retaliation for her work.

Over the 14 years since, she has refused to let her own experience stop her from campaigning, becoming Mexico’s foremost activist against violence towards women and children.

In 2007, she became the first woman to testify in front of her country’s Supreme Court, when she stood up against a state governor accused of both threatening her life and protecting a child sex ring.

“I come from a family lineage of strong women who lived by the feminist credo long before the term became fashionable,” Ms Cacho writes. “My French grandmother fought to shelter and save political activists pursued and persecuted by the dictatorships of Oliveira Salazar in Portugal and Franco in Spain. My mother was an activist for women’s rights in Mexico’s poorest areas. They are the ones who taught me to take responsibility for and act upon what I witnessed.”

Ms Cacho’s 2005 book The Demons of Eden exposed the depth of the sex-trafficking industry in Mexico and saw a multi-millionaire hotelier from Cancun receive a life sentence for child pornography and sexual abuse. Her latest work, Slaves of Power, investigates the trafficking of women and children worldwide from Palestine to Japan to Argentina.

Some of Mexico’s best-known investigative reporters are women, who continue their work in what Reporters Without Borders has rated the third most dangerous country in the world for journalists.

Read the rest at The Independent

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