Betrayed

Within months of her death, Mexican authorities classified the killing of human rights lawyer Digna Ochoa as a probable suicide and closed the investigation in July 2003. Investigative journalist Linda Diebel refuses to let that verdict stand. A note left next to the body, aimed at fellow human rights lawyers, had already raised questions about the official account.

Diebel follows Ochoa from a hard childhood on the streets to her emergence as a defender of Mexico's most marginalized communities. Her account reconstructs a tangled web of events around the death and a cover-up that, she argues, reached into the upper ranks of the Mexican government.

The story moves from the offices of presidential power to the Vatican and into the jungles where Zapatista rebels operate. Alongside the investigation, the book explores a friendship that ended in betrayal and a love story, and it stands as a record of the continuing struggle of the Mexican people for truth and dignity.