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Is Mexico soft on alleged pedophiles?

If you believe journalist and human rights advocate Lydia Cacho, the answer depends on the purported offender. Cacho is the Mexican writer and women’s shelter director who in 2005 published a no-holds-barred exposé of the child sexual-abuse and pornography mafias in Cancun, whose image as a tourist paradise of white sand beaches and cheap tequila masks serious criminal activity.

Among the more shocking accusations in her book “The Demons of Eden: The Power That Protects Child Pornography” was Cacho’s rap on Mexican blue jeans entrepreneur Kamel Nacif for supposedly using his political clout to protect his friend, the alleged child molester and sex-ring operator Jean Succar Kuri, a Cancun hotel boss.

Nacif accused Cacho of defamation, formerly a criminal offense that could be brought even if the “defamatory” allegations were factually true. (The law has since been changed.) Human rights advocates were outraged when in December 2005 Cacho was seized by police and driven 950 miles to the Mexican state of Puebla and put in jail, where she says she was threatened with torture and death. She was released following an international uproar.

Then two months later, recordings turned up on Mexico City radio stations, allegedly of Nacif thanking Puebla state governor Mario Marín while the latter appeared to boast that he had engineered Cacho’s detainment and harrassment. Marín has admitted the remarks were his, but says they were taken out of context.

What Cacho’s adversaries apparently didn’t realize is that she has some friends in high places, too. A group of Mexican intellectuals and artists, including the film directors Alfonso Cuarón and Luis Mandoki, this week ran advertisements in Mexican newspapers in support of Cacho and the case she has brought against Marín, which now has reached the Mexican Supreme Court.

“This case is crucial to the country,” the ad reads, in part. “What is at stake here is the knowledge, once and for all, of whether we Mexican citizens have any chance that the State will protect us from criminals who ally themselves with public servants....”

Meanwhile, Cacho this spring was honored by the U.S. State Department as one of eight “Heroes Acting to End Modern-Day Slavery.”

Posted by Reed Johnson in Mexico City