Crime & Justice

Mexican ex-gov arrested for torturing reporter who revealed child porn ring

Mexico City, Feb 3 (efe-epa).- The former governor of the Mexican state of Puebla, Mario Marin, was arrested Wednesday in Acapulco for allegedly torturing journalist Lydia Cacho in 2005 after she uncovered a child pornography and prostitution network.

“The government of Puebla acknowledges to the Attorney General’s Office its intelligence work to effect the arrest of Mario Marin Torres, expecting that justice will be rigorously applied,” Puebla’s current governor, Miguel Barbosa, said in a Twitter post.

Marin, who governed the central state of Puebla from 2005-2011, had been sought by law enforcement for almost two years after in April 2019 a judge in the southeastern state of Quintana Roo issued a warrant for the arrest of four people, including the former governor, businessman Jose Kamel Nacif, former state police chief Adolfo Karam and the former head of the now-defunct Judicial Order Group, Juan Sanchez.

The former governor is charged with torturing muckraking Mexican journalist Lydia Cacho and, according to the local press, he will be transported in the coming hours to Cancun.

Marin is a member of Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

The activist was arrested in December 2005 by a dozen or so police officers who, without having a warrant for her arrest, took her from Cancun to Puebla in a vehicle belonging to textile businessman Kamel Nacif, one of Mexico’s richest men.

The businessman was one of the main figures revealed in Cacho’s book devoted to her investigation of the porn and prostitution network titled “Los demonios del Eden” (The Demons of Eden), in which she exposed pedophile rings operating under the protection of politicians and business leaders.

During the highway journey from Cancun to Puebla, which lasted more than 20 hours, Cacho was physically and psychologically tortured, as well as subjected to sexual touching and insinuations and threatened both verbally and physically with death.

For publishing the crimes of Lebanese-born Mexican businessman Jean Succar Kuri and others, Cacho was the victim of kidnapping, torture and police abuses, which she revealed in another book titled “Memorias de una infamia” (Memoirs of an Infamy).

In it, she detailed her 2005 arrest in Cancun on charges of defamation – a criminal offense in Mexico – filed by Kamel Nacif, whom she had identified as a friend and protector of Succar Kuri.

The reporter’s lawyers managed to get her out of jail before any further harm could come to her there and the defamation case against her was later dismissed.

Mexico’s Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that Cacho’s individual rights were not “seriously” violated.

In yet another book, “Esclavas del poder, un viaje al corazon de la trata de mujeres y niñas en el mundo” (Slaves of Power: A Journey to the Heart of the World Sex Trafficking of Women and Girls), Cacho exposed global sex-trafficking rings and revealed the names of public officials who protect them.

And in her weekly newspaper column and other published works, Cacho also has revealed precise information about people trafficking, organized crime, drug trafficking, gender-related violence and official corruption.

In 2018, the United Nations Human Rights Committee declared the Mexican state responsible for assorted violations of Cacho’s human rights and gave Mexican authorities 180 days to take the appropriate measures to remedy the situation.

In early 2019, the Mexican government, headed by leftist President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, apologized to the reporter and acknowledged that her human rights were violated when she was assaulted in 2005 after unveiling the child abuse network linked to various businessmen and government figures.

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