Kidnapping Is Growth Industry in Mexico
Businessmen Targeted in Climate of Routine Ransoms, Police Corruption
I have no sympathy with the kidnappers - my feeling there is: too bad Mexico doesn't have the death penalty. But Mexico is a two-tiered society where your success has more to do with your connections than your ability. When you modernize/globalize the economy and get rid of the "patron" system, where at least cheap tortillas were provided, the rich-poor division gets worse. In a society with so much corruption and violence, social tensions run high.
Doc
By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, September 17, 2002; Page A01
MEXICO CITY -- The videotapes and photos arrived every few days. They showed a young woman, bound and scared, crying out as her kidnappers slapped her face and beat her. The pictures, the sounds of pain, tore at her uncle Gerardo like a dull razor.
"When do you want us to stop?" the kidnappers asked on the tapes, and in phone calls that always came between 2 and 4 in the morning. They threatened that the next time they would send her tongue, her eye, her ears, her fingers. They wanted $5 million in ransom, and they offered specific suggestions about which of Gerardo's properties and businesses he could sell to raise it.
He didn't call the police. The kidnappers said they would kill his niece, his mother, his children if he did. From the extent of the kidnappers' information about him, he suspected that the police were involved anyway, as they are in so many cases here. Police cars parked outside his office and his mother's house seemed like a warning he didn't dare ignore.
Gerardo said he considers himself brave, a steel-spined businessman, tough as his Lebanese grandparents who moved to Mexico at the turn of the last century. But the cries of his 19-year-old niece, kidnapped at the point of a machine gun as she walked to school, were more than he could take. And, he said, the words -- "When do you want us to stop?" -- haunted him.
"They get one of your kids and they finish you," he said.
At least once a day in Mexico, someone is kidnapped for ransom, ruining lives and extracting a punishing economic cost from the victims and their companies. It has become so common here that being abducted at gunpoint and held for weeks or months has become part of the fabric of life, an accepted risk, a simple cost of doing business.
Mexican businessmen are overwhelmingly the victims, largely because Mexico has developed a culture in which ransoms are quickly paid and the police are rarely notified. According to court records and interviews with victims and security specialists, police are often involved in kidnappings, and a weak and corrupt judicial system often means they won't be caught.
This article is another in an occasional series about how Mexico remains a nation lacking rule of law. President Vicente Fox took office almost two years ago promising to tackle the legacy of corruption that developed during seven decades of authoritarian one-party rule. But as he struggles against these deeply entrenched forces, Mexico is still a place where criminals carry out the cruelest of acts knowing they are safely beyond the law.
"Criminals do risk analysis," said Jorge Septien, a private security specialist. "They know that less than 1 percent of criminals end up in jail because there's so much corruption and impunity. The government is giving the message to criminals that crime is a good business."
Fifteen years ago, kidnapping barely existed here. But crime began increasing here in the 1980s and an economic crash in 1994-95 seemed to make fundamental changes in Mexico, turning kidnapping -- and crime generally -- into a growth industry. Kidnappings decreased some in the late 1990s, but analysts said they are again increasing in a society where people feel the authorities do not protect them.
Last year, businessman Eduardo Gallo conducted his own investigation into the kidnapping and murder of his 25-year-old daughter, Paola. Furious with police inaction, Gallo began a private probe that eventually nabbed the killers. He recently published a book on his travails called "Paola: Denunciation of a Kidnapping and of a Corrupt Society."
Officials at Coparmex, the country's largest and most influential employers' association, said they know of at least 360 kidnappings last year, and that has jumped sharply to 331 in the first eight months of this year. There are no reliable and complete statistics available. But security firms say the actual numbers are many times higher than what Coparmex has recorded, leaving Mexico and Colombia in a league of their own in Latin American kidnappings.
Kidnapping has become such an industry in Mexico that no one is immune: Maids are held for $500 in ransom; a 12-year-old Tijuana girl was kidnapped this year by college students trying to raise money for school; people fake their own kidnappings to collect from their own families or businesses.
Executives are still the most lucrative target, including foreigners. The daughter of the local head of a Japanese tire manufacturer was kidnapped in 2000, and the company paid more than $1 million in ransom. The chief of a German car manufacturer's Mexican operation left the country about 18 months ago after his wife was kidnapped and a $1 million ransom was paid. A Spanish banker left this summer after he was kidnapped and released.
"It's not unusual for people to take their whole families and leave the country," said the president of Coparmex, Jorge Espina Reyes. "Once someone suffers a kidnapping in their family, it affects them for the rest of their lives. They're willing to do anything, leave their country and their business, so that they won't ever have to live through that experience again."
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