Shooting the messengers: Women investigating sex-trafficking in Mexico

WHEN JOURNALIST LYDIA Cacho published her book The Demons of Eden she exposed a child pornography and prostitution network involving several prominent business leaders and politicians in her home country of Mexico. The following year, she was abducted, tortured and threatened with murder, apparently in retaliation for her work.

More than a decade later, she could finally be about to receive a shred of justice. In an open letter published in April, Cacho revealed that her alleged tormenter, a member of the Puebla state police force, is expected to go to trial in the next 12 months. “I hope he’s convicted,” she wrote, “so no one else will ever have to go through what I went through for telling the truth, for exercising their freedom of expression and defending human rights.”

Recent cases show that it remains just as risky for Mexican journalists to investigate such issues today. Mexico is home to a vast and lucrative sex trafficking industry. Reliable statistics are hard to come by, but data cited by a former congresswoman in 2012 suggests that some 800,000 women and 20,000 children are trafficked for sexual exploitation every year. Several of Mexico’s most respected female journalists have delved into this dark and disturbing world in recent years, only to discover that the criminal gangs that ruthlessly exploit young women often benefit from strong political connections. Publishing such investigations can entail serious risk.

Sanjuana Martínez is another reporter who has focused heavily on sex trafficking throughout her career. She is currently embroiled in a lawsuit over her investigation into a Mexico City strip club where 46 sexual slaves were discovered in 2013. Later that year, Martínez published interviews with women and underage girls who said they were drugged, beaten, tortured and raped at the club on a daily basis.

One of the victims alleged that Jesús Ortega, the former leader of the Democratic Revolution Party – which has dominated Mexico City’s government since 2000 – was a regular client. Ortega denied the accusations, which he described as “flagrant lies”, and responded by suing Martínez for defamation.

Martínez was later told that the lawsuit had been dropped because the case file had been lost, but it went ahead without her knowledge and in February a judge in Mexico City ruled that she must compensate the plaintiff. Martínez said that she was never notified of the trial – a violation of her right to a defence – and was only made aware of the verdict when Ortega publicly announced his victory two months later, by which time it was too late to appeal.

“The problem at the heart of all this is that the drug cartels that make a reported $10 billion a year from trafficking women and children in Mexico all have links to politicians, public officials, police officers and businessmen,” Martínez told Index on Censorship.

“There’s a judicial and police-led persecution in this country,” Martínez argued. “If they don’t threaten to kill you then they criminalise you. In order to defend freedom of expression we must protect our journalists, not shoot the messengers.”

Within days of the ruling, more than 26,000 people had signed an online petition demanding that it be overturned. Mexico’s National Network of Human Rights Defenders called the ruling “a barrier for female victims of violence in the pursuit of justice”. Instead of persecuting journalists, the network urged Mexico’s authorities to investigate the allegations raised in Martínez’s reporting, “which reflect the high level of violence against women, the collusion between authorities and business owners, the absence of investigations to determine the facts, and the prevailing impunity”.

Investigating influential figures can also put reporters’ jobs at risk. In 2014, an undercover team of journalists led by Carmen Aristegui, another of Mexico’s most respected reporters, unearthed evidence that appeared to show that Cuauhtémoc Gutiérrez, then president of the Mexico City chapter of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, had been using public funds to run a prostitution network out of his office.

Mexico City’s Attorney General’s office eventually decided there was insufficient evidence to charge Gutiérrez. The following year, Mexico’s MVS radio network fired Aristegui and her entire team. The journalists believe that the government pressured MVS into dismissing them in retaliation for a series of damaging stories they had broken, including the prostitution case and a subsequent property scandal involving President Enrique Peña Nieto and his wife. “A lot of people are being silently censored,” Aristegui’s colleague Rafael Cabrera told Index. “How strange that it’s only happening to those who do this kind of work.” MVS radio denied the allegations and said they fired two members of Arsitegui’s team for using the radio station’s name and logo to promote MexicoLeaks, a new WikiLeaks-style platform, without their permission. They said Aristegui and the rest of the team were then fired for making an ultimatum that their colleagues be rehired.

The level of risk appears to be rising. Article 19, an organisation that campaigns for freedom of expression, has documented 356 acts of aggression against female journalists in Mexico in the past seven years. These include threats, harassment, espionage, invasions of privacy, murders and disappearances. There were 84 incidents in 2015, the worst year yet. This context makes self-censorship inevitable. Shaila Rosagel, a reporter who specialises in human rights, told Index she has been threatened while close colleagues have been murdered or disappeared. “When things like this happen you start to become very cautious in your work, knowing that in Mexico there are people you can’t mess with,” she said. “Because they’ll kill you or make you disappear.”

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Supporters of journalist Lydia Cacho, who wrote a book investigating child sex rings, stand near a fake coffin outside the Supreme Court building during a demonstration in Mexico City in 2007

CREDIT: Henry Romero/ Reuters

Last year Rosagel wrote a series of investigations into activists who claim to support victims of sex trafficking but appear to exploit the victims in order to boost their own media profiles and political ambitions. Nonetheless, she remains wary of delving too deeply into issues that typically involve individuals with links to organised crime or the political elite. “These things obligate journalists to decide not to cover certain issues. When you’re deciding what issues to investigate in Mexico, you have to evaluate who might kill you for it or what they might do to you,” Rosagel admitted. “We’re totally defenceless. No one protects us, there’s complete impunity.”

Statistics show little sign of an improving situation. Out of 33 murders that were directly linked to reporters’ work since 1992, 30 went unpunished. Mexico is ranked 8th in the Committee to Protect Journalists’ 2015 Global Impunity Index.

Presenting an updated edition of The Demons of Eden at a recent literature festival, Lydia Cacho lamented that Mexico still “doesn’t want to protect freedom of expression or the right to information”. Yet she does believe civil society has become better organised over the past decade, while the press has started paying greater attention to violence against women. “We’re in a slow process of change,” Cacho said of the state of freedom of expression. “It won’t happen in three or six years, but I think that in 50 years things will be different.”

Meanwhile, a federal judge has since intervened in Martínez’s case, temporarily suspending the ruling against her – but there is uncertainty over what happens next. “This is a lawsuit that attempts to inhibit journalistic work, not just for me but for everyone,” Martínez told Index. “We want a retrial so I can have a fair trial with due process. If it’s not possible we’ll appeal to international bodies, because this would set a very grave precedent for all journalists.”