Former Puebla governor Mario Marín was arrested in Acapulco, Guerrero, on Wednesday in connection with a 2005 case in which prominent investigative journalist Lydia Cacho was detained and tortured by Puebla police.
Marín, Institutional Revolutionary Party governor between 2005 and 2011, was taken into custody by federal agents at a home owned by his sister in the Pacific coast resort city.
He was taken to federal Attorney General’s Office (FGR) facilities in Acapulco on Wednesday afternoon and later transferred to Cancún, Quintana Roo, where Cacho was arrested in December 2005 on defamation charges by Puebla police operating some 1,500 kilometers beyond their jurisdiction.
Marín is accused of ordering the arrest of Cacho, who wrote a book published in 2005 called The Demons of Eden, in which she exposed a pedophile ring in Cancún that she alleged was run by businessman Jean Succar Kuri. He was later convicted of the crime and sentenced to more than 100 years in jail.
Cacho also implicated Kamel Nacif Borge, a businessman known as “El rey de la mezclilla ” (the denim king) for his large textile empire, and he subsequently filed a defamation complaint against her that led to her arrest.
After Cacho was detained in Cancún, police drove her more than 20 hours to Puebla, during which time they taunted and tortured her, threatened her with rape, forced a gun into her mouth and debated drowning her in the Gulf of Mexico’s Campeche Bay. She was held in custody in Puebla for two days before being released on bail.
The case became a national scandal when a tape was leaked of a conversation between Nacif and Marín in which the former is heard thanking the latter for arresting Cacho.
During the call, the then governor boasted of giving a “fucking slap in the head” to Cacho whom he called an “old bitch.”
“Here in Puebla the law is respected, here there is no impunity,” Marín told Nacif. The “denim king” told Marín, who he referred to as “my precious governor,” that he would send him two bottles of cognac to show his appreciation.
Warrants for the arrest of the ex-governor, Nacif, and former senior Puebla police officials Juan Sánchez Moreno and Hugo Adolfo Karam Beltrán were issued in April 2019. Sánchez was arrested in May 2019 but Nacif, whom Mexico is trying to have extradited from Lebanon, and Karam remain at large.
Marín went into hiding after the warrant was issued for his arrest and there were reports that he had left the country. However, it appears that he was holed up, at least for some of the past 21 months in Guerrero, which borders the state he governed for six years.
Cacho said on Twitter Wednesday night that the attorney general informed her of Marín’s arrest as soon as he was taken into custody.
“For 14 years I’ve been seeking justice for having been tortured by this accomplice of child pornography networks,” she wrote.
On Tuesday morning, Cacho posted a link to a news story that said Marín had spent the night in the same Cancún jail where Succar Kuri is detained.
“The accomplices meet again but now in very different conditions. Now there is no luxurious party nor victim girls in the hands of pedophiles. There is no toast or celebration. Journalism is the path toward justice,” she wrote.
Source: Milenio (sp)
