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REPORTS: LATIN AMERICA |
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The
Boom of the Kidnapping 'Industry'
Humberto
Márquez*
CARACAS, (IPS) - The kidnapping
''industry'' is booming in Latin
America, where it operates hand in
hand with the political violence in
Colombia and the drug trade in Mexico.
The number of kidnappings is also
increasing in countries like Venezuela
and Paraguay, where few cases used to
be reported, while so-called
''express'' kidnappings have become
all the rage in Argentina.
The amount of ransom demanded and the
procedures used vary greatly, with
express kidnappers, for example,
taking advantage of technological
developments that have changed daily
life, like automatic teller machines
and cell-phones.
In Colombia, the world leader in
kidnappings, more than 18,000 people
have been kidnapped since 1997,
including 2,986 cases reported in
2002, 3,041 in 2001, and 334 in the
first two months of 2003 alone. The
victim is a child in one out of eight
cases.
But according to the Colombian
non-governmental organisation Pais
Libre (Free Country), the real number
of cases is actually much larger,
because only two out of three
kidnappings are reported to the
authorities.
In Mexico, there is almost one victim
per day: 320 kidnappings were reported
in 2001, 358 in 2002, and 169 in the
first six months of this year,
according to statistics provided by
the Employers' Confederation.
In Venezuela, where around 50 people a
year were kidnapped in the 1990s, the
total climbed to 113 in 2001 and to
200 in 2002, according to the citizen
group Venezuela Segura (Safe
Venezuela).
In Paraguay, where only six
kidnappings were reported between 1973
and 2001, 10 cases occurred last year.
The two most recent kidnappings took
place on the same day, Jul. 31. One of
the victims was able to escape after
being held for a week, while one and a
half million dollars in ransom were
paid for the release of the victim in
the other case.
In Argentina, as in several other
countries in Latin America, kidnapping
began to be practiced by leftist
insurgent groups in the 1960s and
1970s for propaganda and fund-raising
purposes. But it virtually did not
exist in the country as a common crime
until 2000.
Since then, the number of traditional
kidnappings has gradually increased,
carried out by groups that have the
infrastructure and organisational
capacity to track their targeted
victims to discover the best time and
place to stage the abduction, and to
hold them indefinitely while demanding
a high ransom.
Four such cases were reported in 2000,
five in 2001, and 10 in the first half
of 2002.
In late July, the former head of the
anti-kidnapping police unit in Lomas
de Zamora, a district that forms part
of the greater Buenos Aires, was
declared a fugitive from justice. He
is under investigation as a suspected
member of a gang of kidnappers. Two
police officers implicated in the case
are already behind bars, and three
others are on the lam.
Since the December 2001 economic and
financial meltdown, when a freeze on
bank deposits led many people to start
stashing away their savings at home,
Argentina has seen a boom in express
kidnappings, in which the victims are
usually seized as they are getting
into their cars.
The kidnappers drive around in the
cars with the victims, who are forced
to call their families on their
cell-phones to ask for ransom.
These brief kidnappings are generally
committed by young men without
experience in the world of crime, who
demand relatively small sums of money.
Argentina's Federal Police complex
crimes division reported that as many
as 10 express kidnappings a day were
committed in 2002.
There is ''a new criminal industry in
Latin America, ushered in by
subversive and drug trafficking
groups, which turned this abominable
practice into a mechanism of
retaliation and financing,'' Fermín Mármol,
a former police chief and former
justice minister of Venezuela, told
IPS.
In Colombia, kidnapping is linked to
the armed conflict that has plagued
the country for half a century.
''In a conflict between irregular
armed groups, the populace becomes the
private hunting-grounds of all of the
bands, and is seen as a political,
military and economic objective by all
of the contenders,'' said Alfredo
Rangel, a former Colombian Defence
Ministry adviser.
But kidnappings are also committed in
Colombia by common criminals and
groups that have no political agenda,
he added.
From Colombia, where there is ''an
overlapping between the guerrillas,
paramilitaries and common crime, the
modus operandi of kidnapping has been
exported to all kinds of criminal
groups. In the case of Venezuela, it
has come in over the western border,''
Venezuelan analyst of security issues
Marcos Tarre commented to IPS.
Paraguayan prosecutor Pedro Ovelar,
who took part in the investigation of
the kidnapping of María de Debernardi
(who was released in November 2001,
after a ransom of one million dollars
was paid), told IPS that the
kidnapping was carried out to collect
funds for leftist political causes,
and that the perpetrators had been
trained by the Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia (FARC), the main
rebel group.
In Mexico, there have been gangs of
kidnappers known for their cruel
tactics, like the ''mochaorejas'' or
''ear-hackers'', who would cut off
their victims' ears to prove that they
were holding them. Express kidnappings
are also common, as well as abductions
by criminal groups aimed at settling
scores, especially among drug
traffickers.
In Venezuela, another kind of brief
kidnapping is on the rise, in which
car thieves force drivers to withdraw
money from their bank accounts before
stealing their cars, said Tarre.
The most famous kidnapping cases in
Venezuela were politically motivated.
In 1963, urban Communist guerrillas
abducted and held acclaimed
Argentine-Spanish footballer Alfredo
Di Stefano in Caracas and held him for
a few days, with the aim of drawing
attention to their cause.
The following year, U.S. Colonel
Michael Smollen was kidnapped and held
in Venezuela for several days. His
kidnappers tried unsuccessfully to
swap him for the life of a young
Vietnamese man, Nguyen Van Troi, who
was executed in Saigon -- today Ho Chi
Minh City -- the capital of South
Vietnam at the time, for attempting to
assassinate a U.S. defence secretary.
The question of politically-motivated
kidnappings returned to the headlines
in Venezuela in late July, when a
political opposition leader, Sergio
Calderón, was seized at his farm a
few kms from the border with Colombia.
No group has claimed responsibility
for the kidnapping, but the opposition
movement opposed to populist
left-leaning President Hugo Chávez
accuses a group called the Bolivarian
Liberation Forces, which it claims is
a branch of Colombia's FARC that was
created to support the Venezuelan
president.
But Calderón may also have been a
victim of one of the many groups that
act in Colombia and Venezuela as
intermediaries who kidnap people and
''sell'' them to other organisations,
which then ask for ransom.
In Colombia, the best-known political
hostage currently being held by the
guerrillas is former presidential
candidate Ingrid Betancourt, who was
seized by the FARC on Feb. 23, 2002.
The rebel group's hostages include 40
other politicians, 38 police officers
and soldiers, and three U.S. citizens
who were at the service of the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA).
A heated debate on the possibility of
an eventual swap of hostages for
imprisoned guerrillas continues to
rage in Colombia.
Vice-President Francisco Santos, who
himself was once a hostage of the
insurgents, argues that ''none of the
attempts at such swaps have worked out
well.''
But Marleny Orjuela, the head of the
Association of Relatives of Kidnapped
Soldiers and Police, advocates a
prisoners-for- hostages exchange.
Those who propose a hard-line approach
to combating kidnappings ''should in
first place comprehend that social
problems must be tackled through
social policies rather than repressive
policies,'' said former Venezuelan
justice minister Mármol.
Nevertheless, ''some laws, like
Venezuela's, are still soft on such
crimes. Kidnappers should be punished
with long sentences, and they should
not be eligible for privileges and
benefits in the prison system,'' he
argued.
Tarre, meanwhile, said that ''given
the violence and determination with
which the kidnappers act, arresting
them when they act is very difficult
and dangerous. Prevention is
preferable, by carrying out
counterintelligence if the (potential)
victim suspects he or she is being
trailed or monitored.''
Venezuelan police commissioner Iván
Simonovis said ''it is so obvious that
this is a business, since 75 percent
of the cases end in the payment of a
ransom that is agreed on after
bargaining back and forth. The
kidnappers know they have a check
payable to the bearer.''
But for the victim, ''kidnapping is
worse than murder, because it is a
death for which they wait in
suspense,'' he added.
* María Isabel García in Colombia,
Felipe Jaime in México, Alejandro
Sciscioli in Paraguay and Marcela
Valente in Argentina contributed to
this report.
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