Lydia Cacho

Lydia Cacho is a Mexican journalist, author and a feminist activist. She has published seven books, one of them is the award-winning Manual to Prevent, Detect and Heal Child Sexual Abuse (Con Mi Hijo No). Currently Ms. Cacho is a columnist with El Universal, the main daily newspaper in Mexico, and a workshop teacher on successful approaches to help trafficking victims and on Community Schools for Peace: a holistic approach to negotiate conflicts.

Books

Infamy

How One Woman Brought an International Sex Trafficking Ring to Justice

In 2005, after publishing her book The Demons of Eden—where she denounced the very powerful men behind the a Mexican child pornography ring—Lydia Cacho became a target. Exactly eight months after the publication of the book, one morning as she was making her way to work, Lydia was apprehended by the police from the neighboring state of Puebla, and taken into custody during a nightmarish 24 hours during which she was tortured, intimidated and abused.

In this chilling memoir, comparable to Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel, Lydia tells her story and exposes the horrific ways in which women—and young girls in particular—are abused then disposed of, while an oftentimes corrupt government simply sits and watches.

Slavery Inc

The Untold Story of International Sex Trafficking

Illegal, inhuman, and impervious to recession, there is one trade that continues to thrive, just out of sight. The international sex trade criss-crosses the entire globe, a sinister network made up of criminal masterminds, local handlers, corrupt policemen, willfully blind politicians, eager consumers, and countless hapless women and children. In this ground-breaking work of investigative reporting, the celebrated journalist Lydia Cacho follows the trail of the traffickers and their victims from Mexico to Turkey, Thailand to Iraq, Georgia to the UK, to expose the trade's hidden links with the tourist industry, internet pornography, drugs and arms smuggling, the selling of body organs, money laundering, and even terrorism.

This is an underground economy in which a sex slave can be bought for the price of a gun, but Cacho's powerful first-person interviews with mafiosi, pimps, prostitutes, and those who managed to escape from captivity makes it impossible to ignore the terrible human cost of this lucrative exchange.

Shocking and sobering, Slavery Inc, is an exceptional book, both for the colossal scope of its enquiry, and for the tenacious bravery with which Cacho pursues the truth.