Media Makers: Freedom Fighters

Lydia Cacho is a journalist and author of more than 15 books translated into twelve languages. She has specialised in investigating child pornography, sex trafficking and violence against women and girls. Cacho has been imprisoned for her work and puts her life on the line on behalf of children and women. As a consequence of her unwavering defense of human rights and journalistic freedom, her own life is repeatedly threatened.

Cacho is the first woman in Mexican history that has taken to trial an organised crime ring of child pornography, sexual tourism and women’s trafficking. She filed a successful counter-suit for judicial corruption and for violation of her human rights.

She has received 22 international awards and she is U.N. Goodwill Ambassador for the Blue Heart campaign to abolish human slavery. In 2000 she founded a high security shelter for battered and sexually exploited women and children in Mexico.

She’s a workshop teacher on successful approaches to help trafficking victims, and Community Schools for Peace: a holistic approach to negotiate conflicts. She is working with teenage girls and boys in the ‘I am NOT for sale’ campaign in Mexico, promoting freedom of expression and civil empowerment.

Jill Jolliffe published her first book East Timor: Nationalism and Colonialism with University of Queensland Press in 1978, written on a Young Writers Fellowship from the Literature Board of the Australia Council. It remains a classic text on the subject

That same year she moved to Portugal to continue work in journalism, publishing with The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Eastern Express, the BBC, The Age and The Christian Science Monitor among other media outlets. She specialised in Portugal and its ex-colonies and consistently pursued human rights themes.

In 1992, she directed her first television documentary, The Pandora Trail, exposing prostitution rackets in Europe and the enslavement of Portuguese, Spanish and Third World women.

In 1994, she journeyed through Indonesia to the East Timor mountains to seek out guerrilla leader Nino Konis Santana. Despite capture by the Indonesian military she successfully completed Blockade, a documentary shot behind Indonesian lines, shown on SBS’s Dateline in 1996. It has a cult following in independent East Timor.

In 1998, she won a Logie Award for the documentary Death in Balibo, as an associate producer with the ABC’s Foreign Correspondent and in 1999 returned to Australia after 21 years in Portugal.

Sally Warhaft is a Melbourne broadcaster, anthropologist and writer. She is the host of The Fifth Estate, the Wheeler Centre’s live series focusing on journalism, politics, media, and international relations, and The Leap Year ...