For several centuries, the port city of Veracruz, located in the Mexican state of the same name, was known for its carnival. Now, though, it’s known for corruption and terror. The state has become territory for the fearsome Zeta drug cartel. According to a study by Mexico’s bureau of statistics, eight out of ten people in the state say they live in fear. At least fifteen journalists have been killed in Veracruz since 2011. During the same period, hundreds of other people have vanished. Father Alejandro Solalinde, one of Mexico’s leading human-rights advocates, has called Veracruz “a factory of forced disappearances.” To many citizens, there is little difference between the rich and the government, and between the government and the criminals.

In this climate, most people don’t come forward when crimes are committed. In fact, in 2014, only one in ten was reported to local authorities, according to Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography, also known as INEGI, after its Spanish-language acronym. But in recent weeks, a man named Javier Fernández, whose daughter Daphne Fernández has accused a group of well-to-do young men of sexually assaulting her, seems to have sparked a mini revolt against the status quo. (Her name has been published in numerous Mexican media outlets and she gave us permission to use it here.) In seeking vengeance and denouncing the authorities for their handling of the case, Fernández has turned the story into a national outrage.

The story began in the early hours of January 3, 2015. Daphne, a seventeen-year-old high-school senior, stood outside in the glow of the neon lights of Bar PH, a popular club in Veracruz. She had joined a group of classmates from Instituto Rougier, a Catholic school, for a night out. According to Javier Fernández’s recounting of the event, as his daughter waited for a friend to pick her up, she was forced into a black Mercedes by a former schoolmate named Jorge Cotaita Cabrales. Three other men were inside of the car, all of similar age. Two of the men, Gerardo Rodríguez Acosta and Diego Cruz Alonso, had also been the girl’s schoolmates at Rougier. The fourth man, Enrique Capitaine Marín, was the driver of the car, which had been a birthday gift from his father, Felipe, a wealthy businessman and politician. Daphne said she was assaulted by Cotaita and Cruz in the car; then, she told her father, Capitaine drove her and the men to his house, in Veracruz’s swanky Costa de Oro neighborhood, a few blocks from the Gulf of Mexico. She recalled being dragged to Capitaine’s bathroom, where he raped her.

The four men—who are all in their twenties—have denied Javier’s account. Daphne commented on the case but declined to be interviewed at length. Her father, who has been deeply involved in her legal claim, as well as her older sister, spoke with me on multiple occasions. After I spoke with him, I contacted Daphne directly by WhatsApp and she told me, “What my father has told you is my account as well.”

After the incident, Cruz called Daphne’s friends, who went to the house to pick her up. (None of the friends agreed to speak for this piece.) In the days that followed, Daphne kept quiet and became increasingly depressed. A year later, in a Facebook post that has been her only direct public statement about the events and their aftermath, she would describe what she went through in those first few days. “I cried until I fell asleep and destroyed my room many times out of anger and frustration.” She wrote that she could see her tormentors carrying on with their lives, posting smiling pictures on social media, and acting as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

Daphne finally confided in her older sister Helena, a psychologist, almost a month after the alleged rapes. Helena convinced her sister to allow her to tell their father, a leadership coach and therapist. After Helena did so, Javier went to his younger daughter. “We didn’t say much, we only embraced each other for a long time,” he says. When I asked Javier what her first words to him had been, he replied, “She kept repeating ‘I didn’t want to.’ ”

For Javier Fernández, who got sole custody of his three children after a difficult divorce, the news felt like “a bomb.” “I wanted to kill them all,” he told me, referring to the young men. Daphne, however, begged restraint. She explained her thinking in her Facebook post, in which she insisted that she only wanted “peace and quiet.” But Javier pressed her, “You have to let me do something.” He ruled out the possibility of going to the police.

“In Mexico, the last thing the system of justice provides is justice. I just didn’t trust the authorities,” Fernández told me during a recent phone conversation. He believed that he would have to bribe his way through the system, “playing the Mexican game of corruption.” He suspected the police would humiliate his daughter and then delay the process endlessly. “I knew they would fail us,” he told me.

His views are common. According to the Mexican government’s National Institute for Women, more than eighty per cent of sexual assaults in Mexico are never reported. A wide-ranging study by the University of the Americas Puebla concluded that barely four and a half per cent of criminals face sentencing in Mexico. When asked to explain their reluctance to go to the police, a majority of crime victims say that they don’t want to “waste their time” with an untrustworthy, corrupt system.

Although he’d decided to forgo the authorities, Javier Fernández wanted some kind of retribution, and he came up with a list of demands for the young men and their parents, starting with an apology. Ricardo Fernández (no relation), a friend who knew both Javier and some of the young men’s parents, set up the meeting at his office. On April 28th, Javier Fernández met with three of the young men and their fathers and recorded a (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqUOH46SLlw&nohtml5=False). “Why did you do it, you prick?” he asks of each one. Cotaita, Cruz, and Rodríguez (who, Daphne has said, was the only one who did not touch her that night) asked for forgiveness. “I regret what happened,” Cotaita says on the video. “I did great harm.” Diego Cruz then says, “I don’t doubt it happened and we made a mistake. We were wrong.” Rodríguez follows suit: “We were stupid. There’s no other explanation.”

The next day, along with the parents of Cruz, Cotaita, and Rodríguez, Javier Fernández met with Felipe and Jacky Capitaine, Enrique’s parents. The young man was also present. During the meeting, which Javier recorded covertly, Ricardo Fernández explains Daphne’s version of events. “In the early hours of January 3rd,” Ricardo Fernández tells Felipe Capitaine, “Enrique raped Javier’s daughter inside your home.” Hector Cruz, Diego’s father, interjects. “Yesterday,” he says, “our three kids confessed.” The younger Capitaine tries to speak twice, but Javier Fernández shuts him down. “Why did you do it, you son of a bitch?” he asks abruptly. Capitaine declines to ask for forgiveness, but his father can be heard apologizing for his son’s behavior and swears he will deal with his son with a “firm hand.” “I understand your pain and your anger,” he tells Fernández. “No, you do not!” Javier responds. “You have a daughter. Can you imagine the kind of hell this is?” After a beat, Capitaine softly agrees. “I would have to actually go through it in order to know how I would react.” Capitaine then praises Fernández’s self-restraint. “You’ve shown you’re a real man,” he says. “Normally people take the easy way out and try to undo harm by doing harm.”