Horror Story

Succar was arrested in Arizona in February 2004 and was extradited last July to Mexico, where he is being held in a maximum-security prison while his case is argued. José Wenceslao Cisneros, Succar's attorney, said in an interview that six of seven accusers have submitted signed affidavits recanting their testimony. He also says Emma was not a minor when she had what he calls a consensual relationship with Succar.

"Succar Kuri never abused a minor," Wenceslao says. The tapes, he says, were doctored by law enforcement officials, whom he accuses of trying to extort $1 million from his client. As for Cacho, he calls her "a little crazy one."

Cacho says Succar bribed and pressured his accusers to sign papers recanting their allegations, adding that Emma, in particular, suffers from Stockholm syndrome.

Emma didn't want to sign, Cacho says, but her abuser still can dominate her.

'Closed Off'

It's night in Mexico City and Cacho has slipped away from her bodyguards, a risky move, but one she undertakes for a brief and increasingly rare taste of freedom. A waiter spreads shot glasses around the table at La Covadunga, the crowded and smoky hangout of Mexico City intellectuals where the clientele shouts to be heard over the slap of dominoes on tabletops.

"When you toast with tequila, you have to look a person in the eye," Cacho says as the glasses are raised. "If not, you have seven years of bad sex, which is worse than no sex."

Cacho calls over the shoeshine man and lifts her boot dramatically to be polished. Everyone is watching. A man at a neighboring table timidly asks her to autograph his copy of her book, then races off, only to return moments later to show off a sheaf of pictures of Cacho.

The conversation soon turns back to sex. Cacho likes the subject. She once wrote a novel about a couple struggling to repair their relationship after the husband contracts HIV from a prostitute.

"I love sex, don't you?" she asks, laughing and tossing back her long mane of thick, black hair.

Some of Cacho's rage at the pedophiles she has tracked so obsessively comes from her certainty that they rob victims of normal sex lives as adults. She writes of Emma struggling with sobbing fits when she tries to be intimate. Cintia, Cacho writes, wears four pairs of underwear since being molested by Succar.

"Moved by fear," Cacho writes, "her sexuality had been closed off, her right to pleasure."

Despite Cacho's notoriety, Lagunes, the news agency director, laments that child abuse still gets little attention in Mexico. The media here focus on the political scandal spawned by her case rather than the abuse itself in a country where an estimated 20,000 children are abused each year.

"It's disgraceful," Lagunes says.

Cacho writes in her epilogue that "hundreds of Mexican girls are and continue to be tortured, violated and trained by powerful men to be sold and photographed."

But she has still more to say.

Cacho is already at work on a new book, this one focused on the trafficking of women and girls. At La Covadunga, she whispers that tomorrow she has a meeting with "a really good source." She raises her eyebrows in anticipation and rubs her hands together.