From exile I write this book that unexpectedly stood before my empty and trembling hands, refused to write one more word about the unjust, because death was on my heels again and my exhausted legs wanted to stop walking, give up, surrender. emptiness, loss, exhaustion and loneliness.
On July 23, 2019, some assassins entered my home, killed my dogs, faithful companions of my days, while fortune wanted my trip to encounter obstacles so as not to arrive in time for what seemed like the last confrontation with death.
I fled from Mexico when two experts from Interpol and the DEA assured me that this was, indeed, the last call from the powerful leaders of the child trafficker mafias, since their emporium cracked in April of that same year with my last statements and later with the Interpol red alert that made them fugitives from international justice.
Before sitting down to write this book, I went through an agonizing journey through New York, California and Spain;
I had paid a large amount of money to an American immigration lawyer to find me a work visa, which was pre-approved, and two weeks later Trump ordered the cancellation of new work visas for Mexican journalists and writers.
I spent in silence incessant nights of anguish, nightly tears drunk alone in the rooms of ten different dwellings.
Meanwhile, I smiled weakly at my friends and family to avoid further distressing them;
During the nights I watched myself brood over anxiety, pushing away bursts of suicidal thoughts in front of the mirror, telling myself every day: “Lydia, this too will pass”.
One morning, after buying vegetables at the market in Madrid, I made a detour to deliver something to eat to a homeless young woman who lived hidden in a doorway next to the apartment she rented;
she confessed to me that she wanted neither refuge nor home, the heroine took away the will to yearn.
Returning home, I consoled myself by thinking absurdly about the privilege of not being in such a precarious situation, only to find myself later in front of a list of exile expenses, seeing that my savings were rapidly dwarfing a life on the run.
As the months passed, my anguish increased over the search for a legal status that would allow me to remain in a country that would welcome me, without the threat that this temporary refuge would soon end and force me to return —in the midst of a pandemic crisis— to the hands of of the assassins and of a Mexican government that supports impunity.
While I worked from dawn to dusk to maintain two suspended lives, in a European country with my economy as a Mexican reporter, my soul friends sheltered me, making the journey a little more bearable.
An Argentine doctor in Madrid, after examining me and noticing the high cost that post-traumatic stress had on my health, told me that I am suffering from the "exile syndrome": my heart is broken in half, a fragment in Mexico and another Here in Spain.
I had to find a way to bring that other half with me, because there are gaps that paralyze, that pulverize hope, and bring us closer to emotional and biological death.
There was something I needed to feel closer to that metaphorical heart: the letters that my mother wrote me for a lifetime, those that friends and family wrote me, those that I wrote and over the years I recovered because people had thought to throw them away and he preferred to ask if I was interested.
And my diaries, from that first notebook that my mother gave me when I was twelve years old to document stories, to the one from my research trips in 2018. It was then that little by little they came into the hands of friends who, pandemic involved, they were able to travel between Mexico and Spain, helping me little by little to repatriate my past.
A letter that is part of the new book by Lydia Cacho.
I began to reread the letters and diaries, I covered a wall with photographs of symbolic moments, trips and key moments of my journalistic career.
So I began the adventure of an exodus in which I rescued the girl who, at the age of twelve, spoke for the first time about death and suicide, the one who ran away from home and learned to love watching her grandparents walk across a bridge holding hands. hand.
By transcribing the letters and fragments of the diaries, little by little I brought the lives of who I am in 2022 and the young woman who dreamed of a life of adventure closer together.
Without even trying, I dragged my past into a small studio in an old Madrid neighborhood —like someone who brings home a wounded animal— and writing on my laptop, I healed it, until one fine day I discovered that it was reviving.
He was writing the biography of an unfinished life and, while he was doing it, he was collecting remnants of my heart scattered throughout the world.
For thirty-six years, people around me and those who read my works have asked how I got here, what secret lies behind a woman who at the age of twenty-two decided to embark on the adventure of defending human rights and freedom of expression. expression under the slogan that one must live from consistency and, if necessary, pay the consequences of such daring.
Any response has always been an easy escape so as not to delve into a lifetime of astonishment and rage, of insecurity and inner strength, of searching, fear, passion and ignorance, inhabited since childhood by a vital anxiety that tries to understand what at first glance seems inscrutable.
The origin of the courage of any human being is unverifiable, it is sustained by seeds of pain, of love, of nonconformity in the face of sometimes unbearable reality;
seed of the past that resounds in a collective memory that calls us, even if we try to ignore it.
It is inspiration originating from the exemplary lives of the people we admired in our youth, it is also the rescue of documents that remind us what that life was like, what the city smelled like, the taste of childhood stews, the fears and joys, growing up out of time, telling while living believing that the present is exorcised without understanding that it is written for the future.
I have refused to talk about the imaginary secret of my strength, because I don't think it exists.
The mysteries do not belong to me, not even life is mine, the only certainty that has inhabited me since childhood is that of emptiness and death, having it close by, understanding its absolute presence in our lives.
There is nothing unknown in death, everything unknown and incomprehensible is found on the side of life, in how absurd and unjust it is for millions of people, in the immoral inequality that divides us into castes, genders and classes, in the scourges that we face when trying to unveil a different course that favors a deeper sense of humanity;
we desperately try to eradicate the excuses and arguments that support violence as a norm that regulates our lives in public and private.
I have said countless times that my thing is not martyrdom or bonhomie.
What has moved me to dedicate my life to writing, to becoming a war reporter in the world who witnesses the battle against the lives and bodies of women and girls, confront gangsters and femicides, torturers and corrupters, murderers and white-collar criminals , is actually the simple and clear sense of justice, having discovered in childhood that no one should ask if they deserve the life they have had to live or if someone deserved a violent death at the hands of a third party.
This book has no great pretensions, it is the historical fragments of a life well lived, the secrets of a rebellious girl, the loves of a feminist, her discussions, losses, confessions, serendipities and revelations.
It is the story of how the other piece of my heart came back into my hands so as not to die of boredom.
Book cover.
When my mother gave me the first notebook in 1975 and told me “write what you feel”, without knowing it, I began a journey that she also wanted to travel, because she dreamed of being a writer.
Her letters published here are a tribute to her, who already dead publishes a piece of her word that is inexorably tied to mine.
Cancun Quintana Roo
September 15, 1988
Dear Mama:
The wind has stopped blowing at the terrifying speed of over 200 miles per hour.
It is now when I find out, with the little information that we can receive, that the damage that Cancun has suffered is so immense that it has been classified as a disaster area.
We have heard it on the radio of the ship that Salvador installed at Andrés' house, where we came to shelter from Hurricane Gilbert.
The radio is from Miami, because the hurricane has not yet arrived there and we have been partially informed thanks to the Florida meteorological center.
Salvador has just left the apartment, there is still a wind of 80 kilometers per hour;
he asked me to stay, he doesn't know what conditions the streets are in, it seems that there are robberies and attacks on passers-by.
I can only think of taking my notebook and pen to write you this letter.
When the eye of the hurricane arrived, the atmospheric pressure and the emotional tension dropped, so we were able to sleep for a couple of hours.
The tension has dropped.
Andrés and Paty slept in one bedroom and Tomás, Patricia, Salvador and me in the other.
Of course we have been dressed and in shoes the whole time in case we have to leave the building in an emergency.
After asking Sal to watch out for her and not do anything heroic, I tried to fall asleep.
You know me, I did not sleep the two days before the hurricane, I was accelerated and I spent more than twenty hours without stopping.
We put all the things in our apartment in the bathroom, they say it's the only safe place.
We anticipate flooding, because as you know we have the lagoon in front of us.
So we keep the whole house in the bathroom.
Afterwards I was cooking for everyone, we are six;
The fact is that despite being exhausted it is impossible for me to fall asleep, I do nothing more than invent some kind of prayer that resembles a prayer.
I think of all the people who live in the worst conditions in the areas that are flooded, at times I fear the worst.
Salvador told me to stop thinking about others but it is impossible, we are privileged, we were able to buy groceries and come to a friend's house in the center, far from the sea and the lagoon, we were able to keep our things, even superfluous goods such as clothing skiing in the snow, while so many people have nowhere to go because they said on the radio that the hurricane shelters were saturated.
It anguishes me to think of the people who, with the same fear that we have felt, have no chance of surviving.
I get up and get a plate, pour some cereal and milk, I only pour a third of the glass of water.
We have to ration food, we are aware of it.
Cancun is an island and it could take weeks to bring food back and to recover water and electricity services.
It's been thirty-six hours without leaving the apartment, I feel like going out into the streets, walking.
My body is numb from spending so many hours lying on a ladder, kneeling and then for long hours sitting on the floor.
I look through the hole left by the broken windows, the hollow of eyes that no longer look at beauty.
The smell of the sea turned into a stench of something rotten, the palm trees uprooted by the wind thrown on the avenue below the building.
There is only one standing almond tree, the entire street is covered with shattered trees, glass, bushes, an overturned car as proof of the chaos.
I see a man who comes out of the neighboring house, helps other men and women to sweep a little, a useless task.
The wind begins to howl again.
He comes back, this is not over.
I am distraught, the cereal churns in my stomach, I wonder what I ate for.
It's 10:30.
Salvador arrived, he was able to locate Rambo, the sailor who was taking care of our boat, hidden in the mangrove.
He is fine, he was able to return to land without any problem, he says that he did not have a bad time, that he laughed excitedly, he had a few beers with his adventure partner the sweetness of unconsciousness.
His family came to meet him, there are no phones, people are leaving, but the radio says that this is not over yet.
The wife told them that the house was destroyed by the wind, there is not a wall standing on her palapa.
Sal says the wife was cool, she said they'd be fine,
the neighbors helped them get some things out in a boat now the streets are a river and they go to a school that they have improvised as a shelter.
"There is no sadness for the material, says Salvador, but when this is over we will help them rebuild their little house."
That's why I love him.
Hours have passed, we left Andrés and Paty's house, now the hurricane has gone to Florida.
The entrance to the hotel zone shows a portrait of the devastation.
It is full of soldiers along Kukulcán Avenue, the one that connects the hotel zone and the city center.
Among the soldiers the palm trees uprooted, the mangrove like a leafless autumn tree opens the view of the catastrophe.
Little by little we make our way alongside other motorists who want to return home.
The hotels are full of tourists, surely terrified.
They will have unforgettable anecdotes to tell.
Some come to witness the disaster, to satisfy their morbid camera in hand.
It doesn't matter that there is no gasoline and we don't know when there will be again, they are enjoying seeing the furniture of the entire hotel on that side of the lagoon;
the restaurant destroyed with what it contained has been left on the edge of the home of the crocodiles.
The tour of tragedy, curious humanity, the joy of losing the richest.
But all is not lost, mother, there are those who have come to the aid of others, people who get out to help the owners of small businesses to put furniture and objects that were left on the avenue.
People who help other people to leave the hotel zone to return to their homes in the town.
Hotel lobbies are gaping, toothless, empty mouths.
All its own on the other side of the lagoon where the waves still imitate the force of the sea.
Nature does not ask for permission from the human invasion and recovers ground again, it will not last long.
Salvador and I walked along a beach, we stopped in front of a huge Cuban fishing boat that tried to face the hurricane by motor.
It ended up running aground on the beach, a few meters from houses and hotels.
The fishermen stuck in a house, drunk asleep, drank and ate until they were satisfied.
They come out scratching their bellies and tell us about their feat, the sweat smells of vodka and tequila.
Smile, it's freedom.
We are alive and we will raise everything again, I am sure.
We go into the house, Salvador sees my notebook in hand, he asks me if I wrote something, I tell him everything.
Smile, in the midst of the disaster we began to return to normal.
The house smells of dead fish, there is water from the lagoon, broken glass, a small dead seagull in the room.
We clean together for hours, we finish for today after making the bed.
There is no light, we open the windows to sleep naked in unbearable heat.
Before I get two sandwiches out of the cooler.
The beers are still cold, we smile and drink them sitting up in bed.
Salvador asks me to read this letter out loud before putting it in the envelope to send it to the Capital.
I realize I have no idea when the Post Office will open, there are no phones either.
Tomorrow will be another day.
I love you,
Lydia
Maputo, South Africa
May 3, 2008
A woman walks through the mountains in a province in northern China, she finds a blanket that covers what looks like a small animal.
She walks over and discovers the little hand of a baby, she opens the blanket and discovers a dead newborn girl.
She alerts the town police, they ignore her.
A man finds a woman from his village hiding behind a tree.
The woman cries.
The man approaches and discovers that he has in his hands the corpse of a beautiful girl.
The woman gets scared and asks the man not to report her.
The Chinese government has prohibited families from having more than one child.
Girls don't have the right to education, they don't have the right to own their land, they don't get good jobs: women in China are second-class citizens;
the children have school and rights and work, they can take care of and support the elders of the family.
A Chinese reporter from Hunan province discovers that hundreds of girls are being selectively killed by fathers and mothers.
He writes a text.
A week later the
New York Times correspondent
find the note of the young Chinese, lost on the internet;
he goes to China and writes an extraordinary report.
Human rights organizations from around the world and from China mobilize, academics from several countries analyze the phenomenon of selective child femicide.
The international community draws attention to the Chinese government, demands public policies that improve the lives of women and a public policy of sexual and reproductive health for all women.
International cooperations focus on China and invest in the creation and strengthening of women's and girls' human rights organizations.
A Guardian
reporter
in the UK reads the story about infanticide in China, she lives in India and something similar happens.
“What can it be?”, she asks herself.
The journalist investigates infanticide in India and discovers some factors similar to the phenomenon in China: the dead babies are girls.
Her report sparked social outrage in England and Oxfam acted immediately, riding the media wave to defend the human rights of girls and women in India.
Journalist John Thor Dahlburg wrote
Where killing baby girls is no big sin,
he published it in
The Los Angeles Times
and
The Toronto Star .
in 1994 and human rights organizations successfully reinvested resources for gender-responsive Indian NGOs, resulting in hundreds of academic studies on the link between female infanticide and gender inequality, malnutrition and cultural sexism.
Thousands of women in India mobilized to defend and demand their rights.
A reporter from EL PAÍS in Spain interviews a feminist about migrant women and she tells him about the women who flee from African countries to Spain and France for fear of being stoned to death.
The reporter decides to follow up on an email in which an international group of feminists, disjointed but with the same mission, are trying to get the Iranian government to stop the stoning to death of seven women who had been victims of domestic violence, whose only crime was not obey a man.
The report hits in such a way that the calls of Amnesty International obtain an impressive echo, and the media pressures towards the governments that practice stoning have important effects.
In Mexico, every year half a million people cross the border into the United States, fleeing poverty and violence.
A television reporter prepares a report on migrant women and discovers that hundreds of children have left alone in search of their relatives in the United States.
A couple of reporters follow the trail and find a wagon of boys and girls between 7 and 12 years old who travel as illegals crossing more than four thousand kilometers of territory, alone, hungry, thirsty and afraid, but dreaming of reuniting with their mother or his father in the north.
Border universities study the phenomenon.
Human Rights Watch prepares a report on the violation of the rights of migrant children, a group from San Diego reads the report on that report and decides to found a human rights organization to care for, protect and help migrant children.
We could spend the whole day presenting examples of the social and human transcendence that good journalism has throughout the world.
But these examples suffice for now.
I am here, alive and speaking in a UNESCO forum thanks to the good actions of human rights defense networks and thanks to good journalism.
As a reporter I uncovered a child pornography network in my country, Mexico.
Powerful politicians and businessmen are involved in it.
I was tortured and imprisoned for publishing the truth, but I survived and continue to do my job as a human rights reporter.
Journalism is a flashlight to illuminate the world, good journalism not only allows us to understand what is happening in our community, it also helps to reveal what prevents our human rights from being fully respected.
Good journalism educates, discovers, reveals, helps form opinion.
Good journalism lights a flame that lights up the world, a flame that incites new ideas, generates processes of global solidarity and, in turn, makes more people aware of the tragedy of human pain caused by humans.
Good journalism makes a difference in the speed at which society reacts to a tsunami or an earthquake.
Every time a government like the Mexican or the Russian or the Lebanese allows impunity for the murder of a reporter, it not only takes away from society its right to know the reality,
Today I ask you to imagine a day in the world without journalists.
No one would know what is going on in their community.
Not the weather, not the traffic, not the dangers, not the good news, not the little everyday miracles.
It would be a world inhabited by silence or lies, a world of false news, a party for criminals, an incentive for corrupt and abusive politicians.
A day without journalists is what awaits us if the international community does not react adequately to the silencing of reporters from around the world who show the daily violations of human rights.
Being a journalist is a responsibility, a privilege that as long as there are stories to tell, we will be there, working to reveal the reality, to accompany millions of people to weave networks of global solidarity for human rights.
Because good journalism is necessarily the main human rights tool in the world.
A hug,
Lydia
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