Kidnapping Is Growth Industry in MexicoBusinessmen Targeted in Climate of Routine Ransoms, Police Corruption
September 17, 2002; Page A01
By Kevin Sullivan, Washington Post Foreign Service
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.
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."
An Unending Ordeal
Six months after the kidnapping, Gerardo said he is still too frightened of the kidnappers to allow his last name to be used in this article. He said his niece, an architecture student, was held for more than a month in a small, dark room with the television turned up loud day and night. She told him four of her captors slept in the room with her. They never sexually assaulted her, but their presence in the flickering light of the TV every night added to her terror.
Another kidnapping victim, a teenage boy, was being held in the same house. The niece told Gerardo that she never saw him, but she could hear him, listening through the wall as the kidnappers stripped him and beat him until he cried, and videotaped it all for his parents. As they hit the boy, over and over, she heard them say the words her own family had come to dread: "When do you want us to stop?"
As the patriarch of an extended family, and as the clear target of the kidnappers' demands, it fell to Gerardo to negotiate. He said he eventually paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in ransom, but he would not say exactly how much.
He got his niece back in March, but the ordeal didn't end. He said the kidnappers kept calling him, threatening to kill his children if he made trouble for them, if he called the police. Once, he said, they called to let him know they were sitting outside his mother's house. They described the place to him, told him what his mother was doing just then. And they said they were going to kill her.
"You go crazy," Gerardo said. He said he bought a gun.
Then a few weeks ago he sold his Mercedes, put his house on the market and moved his family permanently to Boca Raton, Fla., unable to endure the insecurity he felt constantly in the country where he was born. His niece is now studying architecture in Florida and his children are in school there.
"I can't live here anymore," said Gerardo, 45, a fit and trim marathon runner, as he sat among boxes in his Mexico City office on the day before he left. "We have to change our lives. I have a 5-year-old boy. I can't risk him."
He said the businesses he built over a lifetime, manufacturing and selling auto parts and selling real estate, will surely go bankrupt and his 35 employees will lose their jobs. He said he would try to manage his businesses from Florida and with discreet return trips every few months. But he said they require more hands-on management than that, and that the kidnappers have forced him into ruin.
He said he spent $150,000 to hire two private investigators to look into his case, and they told him his niece was abducted by a well-organized gang led by state and local police officers. They were too well-connected and too organized to fight, he concluded. "You can buy anyone with the money they are making," he said.
They have taunted him on the phone, telling him, "You will never catch us, we know too much," he recalled. And they did know a lot. "They taped our phone conversations about two or three months before the kidnapping and replayed them for us. They checked our property records, they knew about our cars and houses. They did an inventory. They said, 'Tell your mother to sell her condo to pay the ransom.' "
Gerardo said he was angry, that he would like to kill someone. But he said the forces against him were too strong to fight, so his only option was to run. He has never reported the case to the police.
"You work, you study, you get married, have kids, a life, stability," he said. "I was going to stay here always. But now we and our money are leaving Mexico."
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© 2002 The Washington Post Company
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