Told you so(*)... You don't have to travel as far as Iraq to be abducted by "ugly terrorists":
Mexico City: The new kidnap capital of the world
05 September 2004
Leaning back in a chair in his Mexico City office, systems analyst Roberto Garcia winces as he remembers the phone calls. The commands were simple. "Pick up the receiver by the second ring or we will beat your nephew until he bleeds. Fail to make the ransom demand and we will send him back to you in pieces."
Scooped off the streets of the Mexican capital as he went out for a hamburger near his home in the modest Iztapalapa neighbourhood, the youngster was held bound and blindfolded for five weeks. Threatened, abused and alone as his family scrabbled to pull together 1m peso (around £50,000) ransom, the middle-class Garcia family were thrown into a terrifying new world - but one that is becoming ever-more familiar to Mexicans.
"We thought that we wouldn't be vulnerable to kidnapping because we don't have the kind of money they ask for," says the soft-spoken 64-year-old as he recalls the ordeal. "Now the poor, the middle-income and the rich are all being targeted. Kidnapping has become an industry."
In a recent report, international risk consultants Kroll Inc estimated that some 3,000 people were victims of kidnapping in Mexico last year - around 20 times the number actually reported to the country's notoriously corrupt police force - placing the fast-modernizing nation of 100 million people second only to strife-torn Colombia in the global kidnapping league.
In June, the wave of abductions triggered the largest street demonstrations seen for a decade in Mexico which in turn led to the resignation of the country's public security minister. The kidnaps also form the chilling backdrop to Man on Fire, a fast-paced thriller by British director Tony Scott that premiere's across the UK next month.
While abductions are rife throughout the country, Mexico's vast capital bears the brunt. The largest city in Latin America with 20 million residents, smog-choked Mexico City is ringed by a dizzying labyrinth of cinder-block slums and has an urban sprawl that covers an area twice the size of Greater London - few taxi drivers claim to know more than half of its streets. The city is also home to 18 well-organised kidnap gangs that have an ever-broader range of carefully chosen victims.
Drawing on a range of conspirators including policemen, bank clerks, domestic servants and security guards at residential blocks across the capital, these gangs work up a detailed profile of their victims that enables them to choose a window of opportunity for the kidnap and set a realistic ransom. Whereas abductions were once cyclical, analysts say the activity now forms a year-round "war without quarter".
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news.independent.co.uk
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