The journalist resorts to her letters and diaries to combat the biography that intended to make her a corrupt governor, now in prison
Mexican reporter Lydia Cacho soon revealed herself to be a precocious child. At age 12 she was writing about death and suicide. At the same age, a cousin of hers assaulted her in her bed. She is not considered an exceptional case. Not surprisingly, every 18 seconds a woman is raped in her country. If sexual violence is something tragic, it is even more painful that 95% of those who perpetrate a sexual assault in Mexico go unpunished.
The journalist, now in exile at the age of 59 in Spain since hit men raided her house and killed her three dogs, is a brave woman. In 2005, after publishing ‘The Demons in the Garden’, a book in which she brought to light the existence of a child pornography network, Cacho was kidnapped and tortured by a group of police officers. The reason: she was not daunted and she denounced a pederasty plot in which powerful businessmen and politicians were involved. She was not daunted either when she recounted that terrible experience in ‘Memories of an infamy’, which has been taken to the theater.
In her new book, ‘Letters of love and rebellion’ (Debate), the reporter shamelessly discovers aspects of her intimate life. Since her mother gave her a diary when she was a child so that she could write down whatever she wanted, she has not stopped writing.
Lydia Cacho has been encouraged to deliver documents to the printer and tell her biography so that no one would offer a so-called version of her life. “The former governor of Quintana Roo, whom I investigated for corruption and involvement with organized crime, paid a former local deputy to write a false biography of me.” That man is called Roberto Borge and he has been in prison for four years. No colleague paid attention to the string of lies that painted an unlikely Lydia Cacho, illiterate, who used blacks to write her books and that she prostituted herself. “I got tired, I knew she had to run away because she suspected they were going to kill me. But I also said to myself: why should they be the ones to tell my story?
Recounting her life, Lydia draws back the veil that hides the existence of many compatriots. Her first writings speak of a Mexico governed by the PRI, they describe the disappearances of students, the contradictions and oddities of a country that little by little gets used to violence and lies. Vicissitudes that are narrated with an agile pulse by a wayward middle-class girl who runs away from her home because she refuses to accept the destiny decreed by machismo.
Cacho, who as a young man had Oriana Fallaci as a reference, asserts that the murders of reporters, exile and smear campaigns have given the final touch to Mexican journalism. “In literature, in music, and in movies, violence has been glorified.” He argues that the journalists in his country have been pioneers of a machinery of men where women were not well seen.
existential search
With ‘Letters of love and rebellion’, the writer draws the portrait of a life devoted to existential search, romance, passion, poetry and the indignation of living in an unjust world. “By transcribing the letters and fragments of the diaries, I was bringing the life of who I am in 2022 closer to that of the young woman who dreamed of a life of adventures,” writes the journalist.
«I felt that I had to do an emotional rescue of myself. Of all the things in my life, the only thing that I have kept and deeply valued in material terms has been my house, because I did not want any man to support me, a car, my photographs, diaries and my letters. The only thing I could recover were my diaries and letters: they are my personal treasure, “says the journalist.
No one comes out of torture unscathed, not even Lydia Cacho. She has had to resort to therapy to get out of the open wounds. She is convinced that stress and repressed fear accentuate the predisposition to a tumor. The fact that her mother was her psychologist helped her enter a psychotherapist’s office without as many prejudices as other people.
Cacho is a wounded lyricist and a prolific writer. She has published 19 books that have been translated into several languages and has received dozens of awards for her work, including the UNESCO-Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize (2008) and the Nicolás Salmerón Award for Human Rights (2013). ).
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