Lida is an accomplished author and journalist who has lived in Mexico City for the last 15 years. He has written a number of books, which you can read about here on his website.

The following is a short chapter about a taxi ride.

David Lida. Photographed by Federico Gama

Money

Onions

Calle Balderas was deserted at one in the morning, except for the odd taco eaters at the white-painted puestos, lit by bare bulbs. The taxi driver picked me up and began to hurtle down the street at great speed. I tried to fasten the seatbelt, but it wouldn’t budge from the wall. He began to complain about his fellow drivers:

“You don’t have to worry about the drunks until about three in the morning. These people in front of me may have had a drink or two, but that’s not the problem. The problem is that they’re tired. A lot of people know how to drive, but they don’t really know how to handle a car. They don’t know the difference between driving at night, and driving during the day, driving when it’s dry or driving after it’s rained.”

As he expounded, he tore down Avenida Cuauhtémoc, switching lanes with abandon, missing the cars at his sides by inches. “They don’t know how to stay awake,” he went on. “Me, I’ve been driving for, what?” He looked at his watch. “Forty-nine hours. I’ve only stopped to eat and to bathe, and to drop off my money at home. I don’t like to have a lot of money in the cab.”

I turned to get a good look at him. He appeared to be about 40 years old, with his hair brushed back, a trim moustache and huge bags under his eyes.

“I’m not on drugs, either,” he said with a smile. “The longest I’ve ever driven is eight straight days, from Sunday to Sunday.” I tried once more to maneuver the seatbelt, to no avail. “I have to bathe every twelve hours or so. I have very sensitive skin. If I don’t bathe, the collar of my shirt gives me a rash on my neck. But the real secret to staying awake is eating. I eat a lot.” He was of a normal body type, not at all running to fat. “In the last 24 hours, I’ve stopped to eat six times. You need to eat for energy. Our bodies our like these taxis. If you don’t fill them up, they won’t run.

“You know what the real secret is?” he asked, now with a manic look in his eyes. “Onions. If I eat a lot of onions, I can go on and on. At this hour, I usually get some beef tacos at a stand on Bolívar. They know me, and they always pile on the onions. No cilantro, just some extra cheese and a heap of onions. ” He must have noticed an incredulous expression on my face. “Look, I can’t give you a scientific explanation. I’ve never looked it up, and frankly, I don’t care. Try it and you’ll see for yourself.”

Lida is an accomplished author and journalist who has lived in Mexico City for the last 15 years. He has written a number of books, which you can read about here on his website.

One of the longest chapters in First Stop in the New World is called “Who’s Afraid of Mexico City?” It is an in-depth examination of the perceptions and realities of the crime problem in Mexico City. The following is an excerpt from that chapter.

David Lida. Photographed by Federico Gama

For about ten years there was a man who was known as the “go-to guy” in the Jewish community in case of a kidnapping. Before he retired from this activity, he negotiated 88 kidnaps, and in each the victim was returned alive. In 76 of the cases, at least some of the gang members were arrested and convicted. Due to his request for anonymity, I’ll call this man Jacobo.

He is about 70, slim, bald-headed and morbidly witty. I met him in his “office” – an elegant café off a hotel lobby. Jacobo blames the wave of kidnapping in Mexico to television coverage. He refers specifically to the news about the leader of a kidnapping ring named Daniel Arizmendi López, who before his capture was known as el mochaorejas (the earchopper) because of his proclivity for sending the ears of his victims to accelerate ransom payments.

“Before him,” said Jacobo, “a criminal would stick up a grocery store or rob people on the street, get 500 or 1000 pesos and then, after a hard day’s work, go home and watch TV. Thousands of these guys saw the reports about how much Arizmendi made and said to themselves, ‘I’m in the wrong business.’”

Jacobo refused to offer any details about how a kidnap is negotiated, explaining that if a kidnapper read this book, he would be tipped off to strategy. “How much is a life worth?” he asked. “Buying and selling shirts is an easy business. You know if you buy a shirt for ten pesos and sell it for twenty, you’ve made a ten-peso profit. If you sell it for nine, you’ve lost a peso. But how much a life is worth is the business of kidnap negotiation. They’ve got a person and they want to sell him. The family wants to buy him. It’s all about money. It’s not personal. They’re just trying to move merchandise.”

The father of another kidnap victim – whose son was returned to him for about $20,000 after the intervention of the AFI, Mexico’s equivalent to the FBI – was willing to go into more detail. He drew a triangle on a piece of paper. The line at the bottom represented the passage of time. The line on the left pointing upward symbolized the mounting pressure, both for the kidnappers and the victims’ families. The line pointing downward on the right stood for the diminishing financial expectations of the kidnappers. At a certain point, a convergence is reached for a sum of money.

If the family of the victim agrees to pay the first amount requested by the kidnappers, then the criminals will decide that they’ve asked for too little and demand more. As painful as it may be when the life of a loved one is at stake, professionals urge the victims’ families to start with an extremely low number, so the final price won’t be usurious.

“Violence is always a part of it, verbal or physical,” said Jacobo. “You can’t be a polite kidnapper or no one will take you seriously.” The longest period of captivity for one of the kidnaps he negotiated was 100 days, and the shortest 24 hours. The smallest amount of money ever handed over was about $5,000, and the greatest close to $100,000.

“And three fingers,” he added.

“First Stop in the New World,”

David Lida. Photographed by Federico Gama

Money
Lida is an accomplished author and journalist who has lived in Mexico City for the last 15 years. He has written a number of books, which you can read about here on his website.

The following is a short chapter about street children.

Montse’s trip

Her face is oval and nut-colored, with the enormous eyes of a gazelle. Montse’s expression is serious, cautious, pensative. Once in a while she drops her guard and smiles enchantingly. Her black hair, straight and thick, is covered by a beige knit cap. Every once in a while, she sticks her fingers inside to scratch her skull and remove some lice, which she smashes obsessively on the pages of a magazine wrinkled from the rain. Insistently, she also scratches her skeletal body. She is so thin that, with her baggy clothes, it’s hard to tell if she’s a boy or a girl.

Montse lives atop a stone platform in Pushkin Park, on the border between Colonia Roma and Colonia Doctores. She is thirteen, and has lived in the street since she was ten. She shares the platform with six or seven companions (two of whom are her brothers, Luis Enrique and Jesús Eduardo), a white dog with black spots called Stains, and the multitude of fleas and lice. They sleep on top of three mattresses, covered by various blankets donated by sympathetic neighbors. Montse is the only girl in the group.

Her breakfast comes out of a can. The can contains Limpiador Dismex, a toxic liquid that dissolves glue, available in any hardware store for two dollars. The sale of such products to minors is against the law, but Montse has found that the personnel of certain shops in the Colonia Guerrero are kind enough to provide it for her under the table. She moistens a piece of toilet paper with the liquid, lays it in her palm, and covers her mouth and nose with her bony hand. This is how her trip begins.

“My mother’s in jail for robbery and attempted murder,” she says. She speaks slowly, deliberately, with a monotonous voice, altered by the drug. “She tried to kill her sister.” Montse’s mother and aunt were partners-in-crime in robberies to get money to buy drugs – any drugs they could get their hands on. Montse’s father plays the trumpet with a mariachi band in Plaza Garibaldi, but he doesn’t get along with his children because he disapproves of their drug use.

The sort of substance that Montse inhales damages the brain, the liver, the kidneys and the heart. Ten or twenty years ago, Mexico City street kids sniffed glue, which was bad enough, but this generation of inhalant is far more destructive and addictive. A body as young and resistant as Montse’s will keep functioning for a few years, but if she continues to use the drug, its decline and collapse are inevitable.

When it’s cold or rainy, Montse and her companions cover themselves with plastic or run underneath the balconies. “Or we just tough it out,” she says. Life in the street has its advantages. “I can do whatever I want any time I want. No one tells me what to do.” There are, however, difficult moments. “Sometimes the boys come and hit us. They come from other neighborhoods, and sometimes they beat us up. There are a lot of them.”

Even though she looks like a gust of wind would send her flying across Avenida Cuauhtémoc, Montse insists that she eats every day. “At first, after getting high, I couldn’t. I got nauseous and vomited. Now that hardly ever happens. People from the neighborhood, from the street stalls, from the tianguis, give us food. They give us the fruit they can’t sell. Sometimes the police give us food, the same food that they eat. I like anything that doesn’t have vegetables or onions.”

Despite what she says, one morning I saw her biting into a doughnut covered with chocolate. She couldn’t swallow it. She spit out the first bite and gave the rest to one of her friends. She covered her mouth and nose with the little paper.

Pushkin Park is a stone’s throw from the Plaza Romita, the principal location where Luis Buñuel filmed Los Olvidados in 1950. A restored version of the film, which deals with the brutal life of street children, was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 2005 and released in Mexico City just after. What is most striking about the movie today is how little has changed. With the introduction of toxic inhalants, the problem of street children here is worse than in Buñuel’s day, when they only amused themselves with alcohol.

There are various organizations that try to help street children in Mexico City. They estimate that there are between 3,000 and 3,500 such kids. An additional 10,000 to 15,000 work on the street, shining shoes, selling chewing gum or juggling at traffic intersections, but they tend to live at home with their families. Those who choose the street usually have lived through such extreme violence at home that the sidewalk, with its dangers and hardships, rats and vermin, seems like a better option.

Children are sources of income for impoverished families and often the violence is related to work. They’re sent to the street and if they don’t bring home the required quota, they are beaten. Girls are often hurt by parents and brothers who feel they haven’t performed domestic chores adequately. Sometimes they’re raped.

Among the organizations, Casa Alianza (the Latin American branch of Covenant House) has the largest budget and most comprehensive facilities, including homes where the kids can live until they turn 18. Pro Niños de la Calle is a daycare center where the kids can arrive in the morning, have a shower and a meal, wash their clothes or even get new ones, and watch TV or play games until sundown, when the doors are shut. Casa Yolia deals exclusively with girls, many of whom are pregnant. All have the best success rate with kids who have been on the street a short time and haven’t descended too heavily into drug use. The rest are most often too far gone, not only from drugs, but from violence and such a sustained lack of affection, that it is impossible to get through to them.

Each day, Montse consumes a half-pint can of Limpiador Dismex. If she doesn’t get it she is desperate. She spent a year in a halfway house without taking drugs, but then told her wards she needed to go back to the street to “help” her brothers. At 13, she already has a boyfriend – one of the boys who sleeps on the platform with her. “He hits me,” she says. “But he doesn’t hit me hard. He gets mad because I don’t eat.” Once in a while they sleep in a hotel near Plaza Garibaldi. For about eight dollars they are kings for the night, with hot water and cable TV. The crust of dirt on her skin indicates that she doesn’t experience that luxury too often.

If she wants a bath or a hot meal she knows where to go: “Casa Alianza, Visión Mundial, Pro Niños de la Calle,” she says. She imagines leaving the street one day with the help of one of these foundations. She’d like to live in another state, near a beach. She wants to be a nurse, but can’t say why.

Montse claims to have heard about kids who have died, but hasn’t seen them up close. Yet when she goes into more detail, death could hardly have come nearer. “Some people die because they do drugs and don’t eat,” she says. “Others drown. There was a kid who got run over and died right there,” she says, pointing to Avenida Cuauhtémoc. “And Aarón, rest in peace, died in a hospital from an overdose.” Aarón was her previous boyfriend. When she found out, at first she couldn’t believe it. She didn’t cry but says she was very sad.

I ask her if she would like to have children of her own. She smiles and her face transforms into that of a child, rather than a street child. “When I was little I had a lot of dolls and carriages. I dreamt of myself with babies. I’d still like to have a baby. But not in the street.”

This week MexicoReporter.com is publishing a series of extracts from David Lida’s book “First Stop in the New World,” which has just come out in paperback. The book is divided between long chapters that deal with topics of great importance in Mexico City (crime, inequality, food, sex and even shopping), and shorter chapters that provide vignettes on certain sectors of the city.

Lida is an accomplished author and journalist who has lived in Mexico City for the last 15 years. He has written a number of books, which you can read about here on his website.

One of the longest chapters in First Stop in the New World is called “Where the Money is, and Isn’t,” and deals with the scandalous distribution of wealth in Mexico City. The following is an excerpt from that chapter.

David Lida. Photographed by Federico Gama

Money
I have never met anyone in Mexico City who admits to being prosperous. People with money tend to refer to themselves as “middle class,” or in certain instances under extreme duress, “upper middle class.” Yet these terms are have different meanings than in the U.S. or Europe.

A case in point is Rodrigo, a 34-year-old public relations man, noted for the parties he plans for liquor companies that invariably make their way into the society pages. Baby-faced, curly-headed, with ivory skin and the sparse beard of a teenager, he dresses with the studied casualness of someone who pores over fashion ads: an untucked striped shirt, jeans, a brown velvet jacket with the collar turned up. “I don’t believe what the papers say,” he said recently. “There are a lot of new middle-class people in Mexico City.”

It surfaced that his conception of “middle class” meant those who earn close to $200,000 U.S. a year, drive a Mercedes or an Audi, have mortgaged a lavish apartment, sport a Cartier or a Rolex watch and wear designer clothing. “That kind of money won’t buy you everything,” he said ruefully. “I live in a small apartment and drive a six-year-old car, but I travel to New York or Paris once a month.” He scoffed at a Mexican fashion designer whose shirts retail at $350. “I buy my clothes on sale in San Diego,” he said. “I pay $100 for shirts. The most I’ve ever spent on a shirt is $250, and that was Comme des Garcons.”

Earth to Rodrigo: The minimum wage in Mexico City is about $5 a day. Only 12 percent of the working population earns more than $23 per day. The largest sector, about 45 percent, earns between $9 and $23 per day. Another 24 percent earns between $4.50 and $9, and 8 percent earn less than the minimum. The remaining 11 percent don’t specify.

Who are the unfortunates earning so little? Look around on the streets: dozens of functionaries of both sexes, squeezed into suits of synthetic fabric, streaming out of the metro every morning. The shoeshine man, the messenger, the woman in uniform standing guard outside the bank. The maids. The convenience-store clerks, the gas-station attendants, the security guards, the construction workers. The hordes of people selling things on the streets – food, flowers, newspapers, Chiclets.

Among the “middle class,” there’s a lot of lip service about what a scandal it is that the wealth is so poorly distributed. But in fact, the relationship between people with money in Mexico City – about 15 percent, most of whom are white – and those without, the great majority of whom are brown – is at best tenuous. On the street, browns and whites rarely look each other in the eye.

Indeed, in Mexico City, where social divisions can be as pointillistic as in England, and a caste system is as firmly in place as in India, people with money perceive the poor as abstractions, blurs who only come into focus when they wait on them. The woman who comes to clean your home, the man who hands you a towel after you’ve washed your hands in the restroom, the guy in the yellow jumpsuit who sells you a phone card at the traffic intersection – you are certain these people exist because they have interacted with you. You’ve exchanged words, they’ve addressed you as señor or jefe and assured you that they are at your service.

Serving you, if not precisely their raison d’etre, is the confirmation of their existence. Even though they dissolve and disappear after your encounter, the evidence of their being is in the blinding brilliance of your patent pumps, the folded headlines at your side, the citrus smell of your newly spic-and-span apartment.

In tony neighborhoods such as Las Lomas, a live-in maid is sometimes referred to as la felicidad del hogar – a home’s source of happiness. More commonly she is called la muchacha (the girl). She tends to earn between $500 and $600 per month. Additionally she sleeps rent-free in a small room, which usually includes a television set, and is given meals (which she eats alone, in the kitchen or in her room) and one day off per week.

Her six working days rarely have a schedule of hours; she’s usually on call from morning until night. Her set of duties also varies and, depending on the exigencies of the family that hires her, can include not only cleaning but babysitting, cooking, serving meals and doing the dishes afterwards, washing and ironing clothes, and the retrieval of drycleaning. Over the weekend in Acapulco, it is common to see brown young women watching over white children on the beach, while their parents are elsewhere.
Brown maids are such an integral part of the survival of Mexico City homes that, soon after Rigoberta Menchú, the indigenous Guatemalan activist, won the Nobel Peace Prize, the following joke circulated:
Q: Why did they make a Rigoberta Menchú doll?

A: So Barbie could have a maid.

Well-off capitalinos, by restricting themselves to specific zones of the city, do their damnedest to insulate themselves from the existence of the poor. Still, they can run but they can’t hide. No matter how rich someone is, the poor are never far away. A few years ago, a couple I know bought two penthouse apartments in a brand-new building overlooking the Parque Hundido, one of the most beautiful parks in the city. They knocked down some walls to make it one enormous dwelling, with various bedrooms, home offices, and two ample terraces facing the greenery. Their next-door neighbor was a cabinet minister.

I slept in a guest room one night, and at three or four in the morning was awakened by the sound of roosters crowing at the top of their lungs. After sunrise I looked out the window at the street behind them, a cobblestoned affair with one-story houses that had brightly painted stone façades. Looking closely I saw that the colorful porticos were nothing more than freestanding stone walls. Behind them were tin-roofed shacks with dirt floors, upon which those roosters were pecking.

Lida is an accomplished author and journalist who has lived in Mexico City for the last 15 years. He has written a number of books, which you can read about here on his website.

David Lida. Photo by Federico Gama

The following is a short chapter about a dollar-a-dance hostess known as a fichera in Mexico City.

Paty
The Villa Rica is a low-lit bar with amber lighting, wood-paneled walls and a jukebox that doesn’t have a single song recorded after 1980. It is an example of what are known as antros de ficheras, and I have never seen them outside of Mexico City.

A fichera is a woman who, despite what is usually a boiler-shaped body, dresses in a short skirt and a snug blouse, and sells her company to a male clientele. Most of a fichera’s clients are after nothing more than her sympathetic presence: a woman he can flirt with who will not rebuff his advances; a woman to whom he can recount the various misadventures and misunderstandings of his life; a woman with whom he can dance to the familiar ballads on the jukebox. Ficheras earn no salary, but are given tips as well as a percentage of the price of the drinks the customers order for them; hence, most have cast-iron constitutions and, as they say in Mexico City, toman como cosacos (drink like Cossacks).

Some ficheras are game for further adventures; if the customer pays an exit fee to the management, she will accompany him to a nearby hotel. Still, most customers prefer companionship; ficheras are closer to geishas than to prostitutes.

Many men like to visit ficheras when they are feeling low. Mexican males, the weight of machismo on their shoulders, are emotionally diffident and cannot express their feelings to the people with whom they are supposedly intimate; a fichera is a convenient receptacle for their sorrows and shames. There is a particular fichera at the Villa Rica named Paty that I like to visit, but not to recount my anguish. Like Sheherazade, Paty has a thousand and one stories, and listening to her invariably makes whatever troubles I may have recede in the rearview mirror.

Paty wears enormous eyelashes and thick makeup, changes her hair color on a regular basis, and flaunts her enormous breasts with low-cut blouses. About five feet tall, she tends to sport nine-inch heels. Her smile is wide, perpetual and, as far as I can tell, genuine. She has been working at the Villa Rica since 1985, her anno horribilus, when not only did the earthquake leave her and her family homeless, but her husband was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (a disease she refers to as “European”). Her salary as a waitress in the coffee shop at Sanborn’s wasn’t enough to sustain them and her two children, so she began her career as a fichera.

One of Paty’s regular clients is an ancient Spaniard who owns the Hotel Toledo down the street where the ficheras take their customers. He only likes to watch – Paty assures me hasn’t had an erection in the 20 years she has known him – so he takes her to swingers’ clubs, where men are not allowed to enter unaccompanied by women.

“But he makes me take off my clothes, and in those places if you’re naked, you have to let anyone do what they want. You can’t say no. Even when you have your clothes on, they still get handsy with you – with their fingers and everything.” She made a face like she had sipped spoiled milk. “Having sex is better because at least they’ve got a condom on. That guy’s fingers …” She uses the Mexican’s universal expletive for disgust: “Guácala. I couldn’t sleep that night.”
Another man, who always dressed in a suit and tie, would take her to a four-star hotel. Before entering, he would buy a bunch of roses on the corner. He would ask Paty to strip and eat the rose petals. “And that was that. He never got naked; he always kept his boxers on. He’d let me have whatever I wanted from the minibar and would pay me more than three times the going rate.”

After losing the 2006 presidential elections, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (who had resigned his post as mayor of Mexico City to launch his campaign) arranged mass demonstrations on Avenida Juárez and Paseo de la Reforma, the two biggest streets near the Villa Rica. Getting around that part of the city became close to impossible, and nearly all the bar’s customers disappeared. Paty, who usually earns about $45 a night, was coming home with less than ten. “The other night a guy came and bought me 40 tequilas,” she said one night while the protests were in full swing. Not knowing when the next time a big spender would arrive, she drank them all. “After all that, I vomited through my nose, but at least I made some money.”

Paty didn’t blame López Obrador for her hard luck. “It’s God’s will,” she said. “In the Bible you’ve got the years of the fat cows and the years of the skinny cows. Right now it’s skinny time. God squeezes us but he doesn’t strangle us.” She put her hand on my thigh. “You want to go to the Señorial steam baths? They remodeled them. You don’t know how beautiful they came out. We can go to a private room. They have cable TV with a porno channel.”

When your humble correspondent arrived for the launch at the beautiful bookshop Libreria Rosario Castellanos, the raven-haired writer was posing for an all-male squad of newspaper photographers. In a country where journalists are killed for poking their noses into dark places and challenging the powers that be, Cacho has become something of a hero for doing just that and surviving, albeit by the skin of her teeth.

The photo session was brief, and then it was on with the business of launching her latest book — a manual for parents in Mexico to help them recognize if their children are being abused and, if so, what they can do about it. That might seem like a rather strange subject for a book, but it is the product of Cacho’s rather harrowing experience.

The sexual abuse of minors is a topic she has specialized in, and Cacho has been the victim of harassment due to her investigations into the issue.

She was a relatively unknown journalist until she published a book in 2006 that alleged the existence of a child sex ring in the southern state of Cancun, after which she was illegally arrested and harassed by some of the powerful men she implicated in “Los Demonios del Eden” (see more details of the case here).

She catapulted to fame when she challenged her aggressors by going public and filing a legal action against them — although it was ultimately unsuccessful.

Since then, Cacho has become something of a symbol for the issue of the repression of journalists and freedom of expression in Mexico. Her last book, “Memories of a Disgrace (Memorias de una Infamia)” detailed the events that unfolded after the publication of “Los Demonios del Eden.”

Speaking to a packed auditorium on Thursday, Cacho said that after “Los Demonios del Eden” was published, she was inundated by more than 3,000 e-mails from people who were worried their children were being abused, or who knew their children had been abused and didn’t know what to do about it. That prompted her to write “Not With My Child,” which she says is an effort to answer the questions she received from her anxious public.

“My intention was that it would be as though I was accompanying the people reading it,” said Cacho.

She was joined on Thursday by journalist Carmen Aristegui, herself no stranger to being silenced. Her prominent and critical morning talk show on the capital’s W Radio was cut last January after five years on air (read the details here).  At the time, the outspoken broadcaster, who continues to host a show on CNN Espanol, said that she suspected her head had been called for by powerful members of President Felipe Calderon’s administration. Aristegui launched a new show on a different network this morning.

She commended Cacho on Thursday for seeking solutions and changes to the problem of child abuse in Mexico.

“We know it”s there and is something that we have to confront,” she said.

“Not With My Child” includes chapters on the history of pedophilia and the sexual abuse of children, as well as how to negotiate Mexico’s ineffective justice system. Cacho says that building strong social networks is one of the most important means of detecting and putting a stop to child abuse in Mexico.

“Not With My Child” is published by Editorial Grijalbo, of Random House Mondadori.

– This post was written for La Plaza

Photo: Journalist Lydia Cacho holds up her new book for the cameras at a launch event in Mexico City.  Credit: Deborah Bonello / Los Angeles Times.

But when we arrived, attendees of the event were loitering outside on the sidewalk. “No hay luz,” they explained with a shrug. There was no electricity. That’s not unusual in Mexico City, only generally power cuts affect whole blocks. Last night, the light was only out in the Centro Cultural de Foco where the launch was scheduled to take place.

The organizers joked that it was sabotage, and friends of the authors reported that cables had been deliberately cut.

But we weren’t put off. At around 5:30pm we all shuffled into the building carefully, guided by candlelight into our seats. We sat in the darkness waiting for the presentation to start.

“Serrano Limón is a fundamentalist who thinks that the modern world is wrong,” stated Roberto Blancarte, a professor and investigator at the Colegio de Mexico and a specialist on religion. The organizers were sitting in front of a black backdrop on which had been mounted a simple, wooden cross.

And then, as Blancarte spoke, the light returned. An electric spotlight suddenly illuminated the speakers, cutting through the darkness like a celestial beam. The audience applauded.

“He epitomizes the right. He summarizes in brief what is a bigger phenomenon,” said Blancarte.

“El Vocero de Dios: Jorge Serrano Limón y la cruzada para dominar tu sexo, tu vida y tu país”, which translates loosely into “God’s spokesman: Jorge Serrano Limón and the crusade to dominate your sex, your life and your country”, is an in-depth look at the life of the conservative activist, who, according to the authors, “has influenced the Mexican public sphere for the last 20 years.”

The rhetoric of Serrano Limón is steeped in Catholicism’s most conservation traditions. A devout Catholic who claims to serve God, he at one stage considered the priesthood but instead opted for married life.

Frausto and Gecko report that he has opposed works of theater and art exhibitions, pitted himself against lawmakers and film directors, and planted himself in opposition to the use of condoms, the morning after pill and the legalization of abortion.

Mexico City is the only part of the country in which abortion is legal. Serrano Limón was at the frontline of a anti-abortion campaign earlier this year to overturn legislation implemented in April 2007 which decriminalized abortion in Mexico’s capital.

Blancarte said during last night’s presentation: “The problem is how much resonance he has with many people.”

To many Mexicans, Serrano Limón is a religious fanatic and moralist. In 2005, he was accused of diverting public funds in an incident that became known as the “tanga scandal”. His anti-abortion organization, called Provida, was fined 13 million pesos for spending public money on expensive watches and women’s underwear.

But the controversial activist has a broad base of support from many people in Mexico, as well as from the Roman Catholic Church and the more conservative strands of Mexico President Felipe Calderon’s National Action Party.

Although Serrano Limón wasn’t there to defend himself last night, we were told by the authors that he has read the book. His supporters produced the following video in response, in which Serrano Limón says that he is a truly happy man who loves his wife, his children and his job. He describes himself as a common man, like any other, with faults and defects, but as someone who has taken the decision to defend his ideals.

[youtube yc8KZhEiFBI]

“El Vocero de Dios: Jorge Serrano Limón y la cruzada para dominar tu sexo, tu vida y tu país” is published by Grijalbo, Random House.

– Deborah Bonello and Los Angeles Times investigator Cecilia Sanchez in Mexico City. This post was written for la Plaza, of the Los Angeles Times.

Cacho made the accusation, which if true promises to scandalize Mexico’s Supreme Court, in a conference last night during which she launched her new book ‘Memorias de una infamia’.

In her latest publication, Cacho documents her maltreatment at the hands of Marin, local businessmen Kamel Nacif, Jean Succar Kuri and other Mexicans that she implicated in a pedophile ring in Cancun in her book, ‘Demonios del Eden’.

In November last year, the Mexican Supreme Court rejected a report by its own Commission that found that Marin and 29 of his officials had conspired to violate Cacho’s rights. Its ten judges voted 6-4 that although there was evidence of criminal acts, and some rights violations did take place, they did not meet the ‘standards necessary’ for the court to recommend action to be taken.

Cacho alleged yesterday that all of those six judges were paid off. Her accusation would explain why a few days before, the Court appeared to be about to rule in her favour but then changed tack.

Flanked by more than 10 policemen, Cacho was accompanied by Carmen Aristegui and the women prompted a chat of ‘No estan solas! No estan solas!’ (‘You are not alone’) from the audience when they arrived and embraced on stage. Cacho has become a symbol in Mexico of the fight against the repression of freedom of expression and women’s rights as well as the figure who the Mexican public most associate with the issue of the persecution of journalists.

Aristegui was let go by her employers WRadio last month in controversial circumstances and supporters of hers said that the removal of her show demonstrates that Mexico’s new democracy was one only in name and not in substance.

Aristegui appears to have joined Cacho in her campaign against attempts to silence journalists who unearth dirty secrets or ask difficult questions.

Cacho cut a powerful figure last night when she thanked the thousand or so people who crammed into the beautiful hall of downtown Mexico’s City’s Museo de la Cuidad for coming and supporting her.

“You never left me alone,” she said to the crowd, calling the public’s support for her case a ‘national act of solidarity’.

Around a thousand people attended the event, during which Cacho said she had been informed by someone close to Marin’s lawyers that the six judges who voted against taking legal action against him were paid off by his lawyers.

Cacho didn’t present concrete evidence for her claim and said it was something that she was investigating. But the accusation will throw petrol on the fire of controversy surrounding the Supreme Court’s finding’s last November.

Mexico’s President Calderon was also in the cross-fire last night. Aristegui described how during his presidential campaign in 2005 – 2006, Calderon had promised to take measures against the Governor of Puebla Mario Marian.

“It didn’t happen,” she said.

“Who protected the pedophiles?”

“Calderon!” shouted an anonymous voice from the audience, rousing applause from the crowd.

Aristegui described the ‘political, judicial and commercial network of protection’ that exists in Mexico to protect the powerful, and referred to Cacho’s case as a ‘national shame’.

“What the hell went through the heads of those six judges?” she asked, citing other examples where the Supreme Court had performed ‘magnificently’.

The book launch came in the same week that Calderon met with Louise Arbour, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, who is in Mexico to review the country’s human rights situation.

“I would like to ratify my government’s firm commitment to protecting human rights and abiding by international standards in this matter,” said Calderon in a signed statement.

“This agreement confirms the commitment to the total respect for human rights in this country and I am convinced that the vitality of democracy is based on its full enforcement.”

Despite the hypocrisy Cacho has witnessed and the disappointment she has felt, one couldn’t help but share her optimism:

“I’m absolutely convinced that this country is going to change,” she said.

Let’s hope so.

Click HERE for a video on the protest in support of Carmen Aristegui
Click HERE for a brief interview with Lydia Cacho, recorded in August 2007
Click HERE and HERE for local coverage.