Supreme Court Decides Cacho’s Rights Not Violated Enough


“The judges are sending a message to the country that cases of this kind will not even be brought before the courts.”
But despite its refusal to order action against Marin, the Supreme Court said that local courts and prosecutors were welcome to use the facts and evidence to seek justice.
Marin issued a statement saying that he was satisfied with the decision. “I’ve never committed any crime, just like I’ve maintained ever since this case was opened 19 months ago,” he said.
Cacho was arrested by Puebla police on December 16th 2005 in her home state of the Yucatan following the publication of her book called Los Demonios Del Eden, in which she alleged the Cancun-based businessman Jean Succar Kuri was the leader of a pedophile ring that involved luring young and poor girls to his home so that he and his friends could have sex with them. She also linked a number of state officials and other businessmen to the shady network.
Following the publication of the book, Cacho was arrested on December 16th 2005. She said in an interview with the website Mother Jones:
“I was arrested on the 16th at 12 o’clock. Probably two o’clock in the morning, the police stopped by a beach and told me I was going to jump in the ocean and die there, that they were going to rape me—and all these things, all these psychological forms of torture. But then they received a phone call. The caller told them to stop it and take me to Puebla.”
After a brief detention, Cacho was released and became the first woman in the country to file a federal suit against a governor, district attorney and a judge for corruption and attempted rape in prison.
One of the main stumbling blocks in the case against Marin was that the strongest pieces of evidence of his role in the arrest and maltreatment of Cacho was caught on a phone conversation that was recorded without warrant, and therefore judged inadmissible by the court.
In the phone conversations which were revealed by the daily La Jornada and broadcast on W Radio between Marin and local businessman Kamel Nacif, a friend of Jean Succar Kuri, on 14 February 2006, the governor and the company boss suggested “jokingly” that the journalist should be raped during the transfer, according to Reporters Without Borders.
On the tape Nacif Borge calls Marin “my precious governor,” and Marin calls the businessman “my hero” as the two celebrate Cacho’s arrest.
“Lydia was the target of constant threats, attacks, and murder attempts culminating in a brief detention in 2005, ever since her 2004 exposure of the existence of a pedophile network implicating top-level figures,” said a statement issued by Reporters Without Borders today.
“The epilogue of this serious case constitutes a disturbing precedent for press freedom and human rights in Mexico”.