WP: Horror Story (re: Mexican reporter's expose of pedophilia ring)

[MountainLaurel]

An inspiring story about a women who refused to back down in fighting injustice.

snip

A crusade against pedophiles has made Cacho, who will be in Washington tomorrow and Tuesday to be honored by Amnesty International, one of Mexico's most celebrated and imperiled journalists. She is a target in a country where at least 17 journalists have been killed in the past five years and that trailed only Iraq in media deaths during 2006. Do-gooders and victims want to meet her, want to share their stories. Bad guys -- well, they want her in a coffin.

In the spring of 2005, Cacho published a searing exposé of the child abuse and pornography rings flourishing amid the $500-a-night resorts and sugar-white beaches of Cancun. Her book "The Demons of Eden: The Power That Protects Child Pornography" chronicles in cringe-inducing detail the alleged habits of wealthy men whose sexual tastes run to 4-year-old girls.

But her book was just a middling seller, and her fight against child abusers was getting little attention until one afternoon in mid-December 2005 -- the afternoon the cops showed up.

On that day, seven months after her book was published, Cacho says, police officers from the far-off state of Puebla shoved her into a van outside the women's center she runs on a crumbling side street well removed from Cancun's gaudy hotel strip. They drove her 950 miles across Mexico, she says, jamming gun barrels into her face and taunting her for 20 hours with threats that she would be drowned, raped or murdered. The police have disputed her version of events, saying she was treated well.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/31/AR2007033101359.html

[ismnotwasm]

1. How powerful

Terrifying as well. Back a ways, when I was "researching" pornography, (not a professional) searching for articles, statistics etc. The sex trade came up over and over and over. It's as bad as "they"--(the ones who bother to report on it now and again) say and worse, far worse. One thing I keep in my head, it's not as much economics as DEMAND that drives this. Females the world over are taught that their sexuality is a commodity, and that failing all else they can sell it. Racism and division between cultures (Them against Us) keep certain cultures in perpetual sexual slavery, in one form or another. Young boys and young men, children and babies. In every country.

Who's buying is the the question. The ones that try to answer that question are in danger, dead, marginalized, ignored or dismissed.

[ThomCat]

2. It sounds like she's having an impact

but not necessarily a big one. Providing children for pedophiles has to involve more than just a few people. I'd love to read that the corruption has been broken open to the point of mass arrests.
x(

Until then, Cacho is doing work of heroic proportions, and she seems to be doing it mostly alone. I hope a lot of people are inspired to follow her.

[ismnotwasm]

3. The shear scope is what is so horrifying

There is so much out there that fucked up and plain wrong, and not just in Mexico or developing nations, when a women like that steps forward, I am amazed and humbled.