Lydia Cacho Ribeiro is an award-winning Mexican investigative journalist and human rights expert. In Mexico, she has been imprisoned and tortured for her exposés implicating political elites. Today, she lives in exile in Spain due to threats to her personal security.

The author of 20 books, Cacho has a global reputation as an expert in investigative journalism on organized crime, human rights violations, freedom of expression, gender and social violence. Her work on human trafficking and modern slavery in particular has gained her numerous awards and recognitions. In 2011, Newsweek magazine named her one of the world’s 100 most influential women. In 2008, she was awarded the UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize. Two years later, she became an IPI World Press Freedom Hero, an accolade for journalists who have displayed tremendous courage and resilience in fighting for media freedom and the free flow of news — often at great personal risk. She served as the jury chair of the independent jury of IJ4EU’s Investigation Support Scheme in 2021.

Cacho is celebrated as a journalist, writer, TV anchorwoman, documentary director and producer and human rights activist. Her work has taken her all over the world while her books have been translated into French, English, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, German, Croatian, Swedish and Turkish. She co-founded the Mexican, Central American and Caribbean Journalists’ Network. Her investigations have exposed flaws in Mexico’s justice system and international laws against human trafficking.

Cacho’s investigative work resulted in the first life sentence for an international child pornography producer and child sex trafficker operating in Mexico — the first sentence of its kind in Latin America.

She has won 66 international awards, including the Lincoln Brigades/Alba Puffin Award for Human Rights, the Human Rights Watch Award, the Ginetta Sagan Amnesty Award and the Courage in Journalism Award by the International Women’s Media Foundation.

Cacho has been a guest lecturer at Columbia University, New York University, Syracuse University, University of Michigan, Stanford University, University of Utah, UCLA, London School of Economics, Universidad Complutense de Madrid and Universidad de Cadiz, among others.

As the founder of high-security shelters in Mexico, Cacho has shown how victims of gender violence and sexual exploitation can become survivors and how civil society can transform the system to promote human rights.

In 2011, the United Nations Office on Drug and Crime appointed her as International Ambassador of the Blue-Ribbon Campaign to eradicate sex slavery.

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