The story of Lydia Cacho, who after writing a book exposing the sexual abuse and crimes of a powerful man, she in illegally arrested, tortured, and spends years fighting back against the entire justice system system of Mexico, fighting for justice for the children she has devoted her life to protect.
The idea of governmental corruption and the accepted collateral of abuse has become so (or has always been) horrifically normalized, and seeing it in action can often spur a sense of hopelessness, of being in a machine far beyond you, within jaws far more powerful than you, in a system meant to hurt, break, and corrupt, you. There is not a single thought, deed, action, or dream, the corrupted and sickened men in this book could have ever have even given an eternity to make up for their evil.
But with that corruption, with the license to destroy that wealth gives, there are also stories of those who rise against it. Those who see the machine, and the cogs and the gears and the body parts within and decide that this doesn't have to be our future. This doesn't have to be all there is to experience, to live within the stomach of a deviously paternal and feral monster who expects you to worship it's saliva as you brush and sharpen it's teeth. Castration, either literal or metaphorical is still possible, to those willing.
Lydia Cacho is one of those who decided to fight. Even with the death threats, the arrests, the endless trials, and the trauma she continued to believe in a future where young girls aren't made hollow and young boys aren't made hateful. A being with enough greed, and with the unfortunate possession of a cock will offer little resistance to the darkest impulses and imaginations that they can conjure and make reality. They will take and they will break, but she kept speaking, she kept shedding light, she kept sheltering woman and girls, she kept talking to them, comforting them, going to the edges of hell for them, because she could see that other world, that world where the monsters had slit bellies rather than endless hunger.
This book follows her ups and downs but ultimately despite the subject material, despite the pain, it ends on an undeniably hopeful note, that in the end what she did mattered, she was able to slay and strike fear into a few of the monsters. She was able to make the men who dream only of children finally afraid of a woman. She was able to made them hide and cower. And if she can, then anyone with enough will, and enough imagination to see a world other than what we was sold us and branded on our skin can as well.
The world can be a sick place, but some people live as cures. And when they speak we MUST listen.