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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | November 2007 
Supreme Court Lets Governor Off the Hook
 Diego Cevallos - IPS
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| | Lydia Cacho |
Mexico City - Mexico’s Supreme Court disappointed human rights groups Thursday when it voted not to uphold an earlier decision according to which activist Lydia Cacho was the victim of trumped-up legal charges and human rights abuses aimed at punishing her for exposing an alleged child sex ring.
By six votes against four, the Court, which was investigating the case at the request of Congress, concluded that Governor Mario Marín of the central Mexican state of Puebla as well as a number of prosecutors and judges could not be found guilty due to "lack of evidence."
The magistrates said they were unable to use as evidence around a dozen telephone calls that were taped without a legal order and leaked to the press.
In the obscenity-laced conversations, which were aired by the media early last year, a voice identified as that of Marín can be heard saying he got the police to arrest Cacho for implicating businessmen close to him in her 2005 book "Demons of Eden", about a supposed child prostitution ring in the southeastern resort town of Cancún.
"What the Court just did is appalling," said Cacho, after hearing the news of the resolution. "The message to Mexico is that there is no chance for anyone who is a victim of human rights violations."
"A governor guilty of protecting a network of pedophiles is being declared innocent," the journalist said.
Supreme Court magistrate Juan Silva Meza had released a report Monday stating that at least 30 public officials, including Marín, conspired in the abuse of power, peddling of influence and violations of the rights of Cacho.
The 44-year-old activist and writer was arrested by the police in late 2005, driven 900 km from the southeastern state of Quintana Roo to Puebla, held in a prison cell for 30 hours, mistreated and threatened.
Although the charges were dropped, she was arrested after being accused of criminal libel by textile mogul Kamel Nacif, who is described in the book as a close friend of hotel owner Jean Succar.
Succar, who fled Mexico in 2003 after being exposed as the head of the pedophile ring, was arrested in the United States in February 2004 and extradited to Mexico.
"There was an agreement between authorities in Puebla and Quintana Roo to infringe on the individual rights of the journalist," Silva Meza said Monday.
But when the Supreme Court reviewed his findings, a majority of its members voted that the accused officials were not guilty.
Six of the justices ruled that there was a lack of solid legal evidence that Cacho’s rights were abused during her brief time in a jail cell, or that authorities conspired to take action against her.
Fabián Sánchez, head of the Mexican Commission for the Defence and Promotion of Human Rights, described the Supreme Court verdict as "terrible."
"With this kind of sentence, human rights are undermined even further. It was very clear to everyone that Cacho was a victim," he told IPS.
The leaked phone conversations indicated that Marín’s plan was to have Cacho, who is the director of a Cancún women’s shelter, raped and tortured in the Puebla prison.
But local human rights groups and international organisations like Amnesty International, the World Organisation Against Torture and the Inter-American Press Association immediately raised an outcry, and Cacho was released on bail.
Marín, of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which governed Mexico non-stop from 1929 to 2000, consistently denied that it was his voice on the tapes. However, independent experts, as well as other participants in the conversations, said that it was him.
"We can accept that evidence like this (the illegal tape recordings) cannot be seen as proof in a court of law, but in the context of the case, and alongside the rest of the evidence, the governor’s guilt was very clear," said Sánchez.
"We have all been left defenceless by this Supreme Court ruling. If justice can't be found in the highest court, then where can it be found?" the activist asked. The Supreme Court only carries out inquiries into alleged human rights violations in extraordinary cases, and when it has been requested to do so by other branches of the state, or when the abuses are considered to have had broad repercussions. However, it merely hands down an opinion, without deciding on sanctions.
"What we have discovered through Cacho’s case is that justice in general is failing us. The entire foundation of the system is in bad condition, and the Court cannot remedy that," said Sánchez.
In earlier interviews with IPS, Cacho said "Mexico is a paradise for child prostitution and pornography, because these rings have enough economic power to corrupt and operate with impunity."
Her book contains the personal accounts of young girls about the sexual abuse they suffered at the hands of the child prostitution and pornography racket allegedly run by Succar.
"Who wouldn't be afraid of these people? I'm afraid of them, and I have no doubt that the strings pulled by child pornographers are behind the trial I'm facing," she said at the time.
In the book, the girls describe how the hotel owner sexually abused them himself, set up a prostitution ring to allow others to have sex with them, and photographed them to sell the pornographic images on the Internet.
A 2004 study by researcher Elena Azaola, which estimated that some 17,000 children under the age of 18 are victims of the sex trade in Mexico, is also based on interviews with minors who managed to escape, as well as visits to establishments where underage girls and boys are forced to work as prostitutes. Her report was sponsored by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). |
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