Horror Story

Cacho has since persuaded Mexico's Supreme Court to hear a human rights complaint -- the first such case involving a journalist for a court that previously had only looked into human rights cases from the distant past. But in Mexico, where corruption and violence against women are rampant, there have been no repercussions for the central players.

Still, with each new tape, commentators went wild, many calling for Marín's resignation. Satirists went even wilder. Almost overnight, performance artists were taking to stages to mock the governor, songs were being composed and satiric cognac ads were being posted on the Internet.

"For that very special occasion, to celebrate among friends, arrives the commemorative cognac 'My Precious Governor,' begins one spoof advertisement set to the new-agey strains of Enya's "Orinoco Flow (Sail Away)." "My Precious Governor. So that you can become a good pedophile."

Suddenly, Cacho was everywhere: the evening news, talk shows, newspaper front pages. Nacif and Marín, unwittingly, had made her a star.

Feminist From the Start

Lydia Cacho is 42 years old, but she looks younger. She keeps fit with a yoga regimen and favors tight jeans, spike-heel boots and plunging necklines. She's a head-turner and she knows it.

She also knows she doesn't fit the mold of a feminist expected by the old-style, "machismo"-dominated political system that she says infuriates her for neglecting women.

"They think we're all ugly, fat, mustachioed feminists," Cacho, who studied humanities at the Sorbonne and speaks four languages, said one recent afternoon over hibiscus flower tea at a Cancun cafe. "I don't have to dress like a man to demonstrate that I am intelligent. I am a woman. I dress like I want. If they have a problem with my attractiveness, with my sexuality, that's their problem."

Cacho's feminism sprouted in the "lost cities" outside Mexico City, the impoverished squatters' hells that developed in the 1960s and 1970s with almost no government regulation. She didn't much like playing with dolls, she says, so she spent weekends as a child in the lost cities working on homespun social aid programs with her mother, Paulette Ribeiro Monteiro, an early Mexican feminist who died four years ago.

"Her passion comes from her mother," said Lucía Lagunes, director of a Mexico City news agency that focuses on women's issues. "Her mother taught her to have ideals and to fight for them."

In more than two decades straddling activism and journalism, those ideals have been tested. Cacho has run from angry drug dealers waving AK-47s because she sheltered their battered wives. She has been threatened too many times to count.

She's gotten used to death and says she doesn't fear her own. Her grandfather, she says, died in her arms when she was 17. He was the first of 20 people who she says have breathed their last while she held them, most clients of an AIDS shelter she founded.

In 1999, she says, she was raped by a man in a bus station bathroom.