Former Puebla Governor Mario Marín arrested for the ‘Lydia Cacho case’

The former governor of Puebla Mario Marín, in a ceremony in January 2011.Francisco Guasco / CUARTOSCURO

The former governor of Puebla Mario Marín was arrested this Wednesday in Acapulco (Guerrero) by the Attorney General’s Office (FGR). Marín had been a fugitive from justice for two years due to an arrest warrant issued by a Quintana Roo judge. The politician is accused of ordering the torture and illegal arrest of journalist Lydia Cacho in 2005, when he was ruling in Puebla (2005-2011). Cacho had denounced in his book The demons of eden a network of child sexual exploitation in which it mentioned the businessmen Jean Succar Kuri and Kamel Nacif as responsible. The journalist was arrested and tortured by the Puebla Prosecutor’s Office accused of defamation, in an action ordered by the then governor.

Fifteen years ago, Mexico heard a phone call between Nacif and Marín in which the then governor of Puebla promised to “give the journalist his slap in the face” for bothering the businessman. Cacho was transferred from Quintana Roo, where she lived, to Puebla, in a journey of more than 20 hours by road in which she was threatened with death and tortured by ministerial agents. Since then, the journalist has denounced the abuse of power that the politician of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) maintained in Puebla and his participation in the events of 2005. The audio, published in February 2006 by the newspaper The Day, revealed the level of influence of businessmen with the PRI government:

“What happened, my precious góber, my fucking hero,” Nacif commented to the politician.

“No, you are the hero of this movie, Dad.” Yesterday I finished giving this old bitch a fucking slap. I told him that here in Puebla the law is respected.

Marín only took from the publication of the call the nickname of ‘precious góber’, but he was never investigated for his participation in Cacho’s arrest until 2019. Then, the United Nations (UN) recognized that the journalist’s rights they had been violated and demanded that the Mexican government begin legal proceedings against those responsible. The Andrés Manuel López Obrador Administration apologized to Cacho for the abuses and guaranteed that it would punish Marín and Nacif. A few months later, a court issued his arrest warrant and sent the information about the former governor to Interpol. The arrests of Nacif and the former head of the Puebla Judicial Police, Adolfo Karam, are pending.

The journalist has lived for the last 15 years under strict security measures, even leaving Mexico in some seasons, after receiving various death threats. “I want to live to sentence them; it is the only way to set precedents on the networks of trafficking of girls and boys that end in torture of witnesses and murders of journalists and human rights defenders, ”Cacho told this newspaper in 2019. There is a whole security device around it that was reinforced since the ex-governor’s escape. “I am the main witness of these trials and I will be there to ratify everything necessary. This is not my hunger for justice, it is that of a whole country tired of being given war and fear to eat every day, “he added.



source https://pledgetimes.com/former-puebla-governor-mario-marin-arrested-for-the-lydia-cacho-case/