Horror Story

"He left me for dead and I walked out of the public bathroom at the bus station with fractured bones, but the adrenaline of fear," Cacho wrote in an e-mail. "As a journalist before, I kept writing about the importance of filing reports with the police, and after the rape I learned that the main thing is to recover and to be protected and to be more sensitive to victims of violent crimes."

A friend in the prosecutor's office told her she was probably attacked as revenge for her social work and her newspaper columns. But she decided not to pursue the case.

"I did not want to be news (ha ha)," she wrote. "I just wanted to keep going."

Digging Deep

In 2004, a journalist friend asked Cacho to co-write a book about a burgeoning child abuse scandal in Cancun. A young woman had approached the authorities and said Succar, the multimillionaire Cancun hotel owner, had begun abusing her when she was 13. Others, including her sister and girls as young as 8, also had been molested, the young woman said.

Cacho had hosted her own local radio and television shows, as well as written newspaper columns for years, but this was to be her first attempt at a nonfiction book. Still, she spun an outline in a matter of days for a book that would not only allege Succar had abused more than 100 girls, but also accuse him of laundering money for organized crime and of being protected by powerful politicians.

"Are you crazy?" she recalls her friend telling her.

The friend, whose name she keeps secret for fear of repercussions, quickly dropped out. Cacho started writing.

"Demons of Eden" opens with a 13-year-old girl, whom Cacho calls "Cintia," clutching a stuffed animal as she tells a psychologist how Succar -- the man she called "Uncle Johnny" -- molested her at the age of 8. Afterward, Cintia says, he brandished a knife and threatened to cut her "into pieces." Cacho quotes the girl saying, "He is the devil."

In muscular, stinging prose, Cacho writes that Succar's victims suffer as much after they approach authorities as before. A local prosecutor calls a news conference and distributes photographs of the girls, their addresses, their parents' names and even their cellphone numbers. A school "morals teacher" reveals that she knew about Succar's abuse for years but did nothing about it.

The reporters following the case are depicted as vile as well. Cacho writes of overhearing a group of male journalists speculating in a smoke-filled room about whether a 12-year-old could enjoy sex and commenting that "old Succar likes young meat."

A key moment comes when Succar's first accuser, whom Cacho calls "Emma" in her book, lures Succar to a Cancun restaurant equipped with a hidden camera set in place by law enforcement officials. In the video, Succar describes sex with 4-year-old girls as "my vice" and says he knows he is committing a crime.

Armed with such damning evidence, Cacho says, the authorities do nothing, except tip off Succar about the allegations. The heads-up gives him ample time in late 2003, she writes, to buy a first-class ticket to the United States, where he owns a Los Angeles mansion.