Mario Marín liked to talk about his humble origins and how, coming from a large family of 11 brothers from the town of Nativitas Cuautempan, he had become the powerful governor of the State of Puebla.
The prodigal son of the Mixtec Puebla woman awaits tonight in a Cancun prison for a judge's decision about his future.
Marín (Coyotepec, 1956) is accused of ordering the illegal detention and torture of journalist Lydia Cacho in 2005, when he was that opulent ruler who could do anything.
The politician was a rising star of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) until one morning in February 2006, when all of Mexico heard his voice in a call in which he guaranteed impunity to the textile businessman Kamel Nacif, who participated in a sexual exploitation network. child that Cacho denounced.
Marín followed all the rules for political ascent at the end of the 20th century and accumulated power as few have achieved in Mexico.
His fall from grace has been agonizing, a fugitive from justice and finding refuge in a neighborhood in the port of Acapulco, where he was arrested on Wednesday.
Marín stood by the right people.
Lawyer from the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (BUAP), he accumulated enough experience to make a career in the courts and later in the PRI.
He spent the decade of the 80s in the service of the most prominent politicians in the region and was the private secretary of several of them.
The young man from the Mixtec –the poorest region of the state, with a reputation in New York for being the place of origin of a good part of the immigrants who settle there– formed an impeccable resume that allowed him to reach the government administration.
In those years, the PRI in Mexico was not in doubt.
They all wanted to be with the PRI, assuming that opacity was a way of governing.
In the 90s, Marín already enjoyed a reputation and then-Governor Manuel Bartlett - now director of the state electricity company, CFE - chose him as his Secretary of the Interior.
Bartlett catapulted him first to seek mayor of the city of Puebla and then it was almost natural that Marín opted for governor in 2004. By then, the entire State was already at his service, he hated the press and the significant growth of his patrimony it was visible.
A model similar to that of the chiefdom worked in Puebla.
His image even found its way onto a mural in the Puebla City Hall in 2000:
The founding of Puebla
- by the painter Fernando Rodríguez - showed Marín as the city's architect.
His face was erased years later.
His name began to serve to name schools, markets and streets.
Despite the fact that the Government of the Republic was in the hands of Vicente Fox, of the conservative National Action Party (PAN), a good part of the state governments were on the account of the PRI, who like Marín had made their regions a kind of fiefdoms.
Wind in its sails, his sister once told the press that the politician had wood for Los Pinos, the former presidential residence.
As soon as he began his term in Puebla, Marín made the call that changed everything.
A telephone tap undressed the politician.
Kamel Nacif thanked him for having arrested the journalist who in the book
The Demons of Eden
accused him of participating in a network of sexual exploitation of girls.
Marín assured the businessman that Cacho received "a fucking bump", but not before asking his friend for "two bottles of cognac" in exchange for the favor and ensuring that in Puebla "the law is respected."
The recording was the biggest political scandal in Mexico that year, it showed the way in which political power is exercised in the country with the brand of the tricolor party.
Marín acquired the nickname “precious góber” –because Nacif called him that in the call– and in a futile effort to defend himself argued that he had been the victim of a trap.
"That voice on the recording is not mine, that is, it is me, but it is not my voice," he told journalist Carlos Loret de Mola in a television interview.
Once his political career was blown up, five years of ostracism followed.
Cacho denounced him and took the case to the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN), where the magistrates - among them Olga Sánchez Cordero, the current Secretary of the Interior of Mexico - said they could not find reasons to judge the politician.
For the journalist, a life began to stalk and flee, on several occasions abroad, in the face of increasing death threats she received.
Although Marín saved his government and evaded any legal action against him, the revolving door of Mexican politics no longer gave him another chance.
The scandal had ruined the PRI in Puebla and several politicians blamed him behind closed doors.
In the 2010 elections, the PRI lost the government of Puebla, paradoxically, against a former collaborator of Marín who changed his political line upon seeing the debacle: Rafael Moreno Valle.
In an interview in 2011, the former governor said he felt "nostalgic" for the end of his government and announced his retirement after 33 years in public office.
In Puebla he was seen very little.
If anything, in 2013 he appeared on the pages of the magazines of the heart attending the lavish wedding of his first-born son, Mario Marín García, in the Cathedral of Puebla.
Marín García defended him in 2009 and assured that the whole case around his father had been "a legal issue that became politicized."
Every day, fewer politicians were seen by Marín's side, some devising ingenious responses when questioned about his exile.
The tranquility he enjoyed changed suddenly in 2019, when a judge in Quintana Roo ordered his capture.
The López Obrador government apologized to Cacho for the torture and abuse of power, and promised to bring those responsible to justice.
On the afternoon of Wednesday, February 3, 2021, Marín was at his sister's house in Acapulco, where the agents who detained him arrived.
He had been on the run for more than a year, he no longer returned to Nativitas Cuautempan, not even to his father's funeral.
The current governor of Puebla, Miguel Barbosa, celebrated the arrest of the politician and the use of intelligence to achieve it.
Barbosa, who was the leader of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD, on the left) when Marín ruled and now belongs to the National Regeneration Movement (Morena), has asked that he be investigated not only for the
Lydia Cacho case
but also for the "Enormous fortune placed in the hands of famous men and corrupt men like him throughout the state."
"There are many other things, many crimes," he said.
Faced with the silence of the Puebla political class after Marín's capture, Barbosa accused them: "What they want is to sweep, put everything under the carpet and everyone is quiet."
In Puebla there is shame, but above all silence.