By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Feb 5 2002 (IPS)

The arrest in Brazil of six suspects, presumably Chileans, implicated in the kidnapping of local advertising mogul Washington Olivetto has led to speculation that the guerrilla spirit is still alive in small isolated cells in Latin America.

But the kidnapping of Olivetto, who was released after 53 days in captivity, “was apparently a common crime aimed at obtaining ransom,” said the Sao Paulo Secretary of Public Security, Saulo de Castro Abreu, who presented the six detainees to the press Monday.

The head of the group of foreign nationals under arrest is Mauricio Hernández Norambuena, 43, one of the leaders of the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front (FPMR), a Chilean guerrilla group that emerged during the struggle against the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973-90) in that country.

The Chilean government reported that it would seek Hernández Norambuena’s extradition. In 1996, the former insurgent escaped by helicopter from a high security prison in Santiago, where he was serving two life sentences for planning the murder of right-wing Senator Jaime Guzmán and for kidnapping Cristián Edwards, the son of the owner of the El Mercurio newspaper, in 1991.

The other five suspects were in Brazil on tourist visas, and carried Argentine or Spanish passports. However, the police suspect that they are all Chilean nationals, and has asked authorities in Chile to confirm their identities.

The group is “highly organised,” and the arrests involved the members of just one of the cells, said police commissioner Wagner Giudice, the head of the Anti-Kidnapping Division of the Sao Paulo police.

Giudice added that police were looking for two other suspects implicated in Olivetto’s kidnapping who have also been identified, and that another six people, still unidentified, may have been involved.

“These international criminal rings can be comprised of up to 25 members,” spread out in different cells, the police commissioner told Brazil’s CBN radio network.

He said that while the foreign suspects allegedly took part in the kidnapping, they were not the ones guarding the hostage.

The six put up no armed resistance when they were arrested Friday in a rented house in Sierra Negra, a resort town located 150 kms from Sao Paulo, where they had raised the suspicions of the landlord, who called the police.

Also confiscated were several letters from Olivetto, addressed to members of his family, asking them to pay the ransom because he was being held in difficult conditions, in a stuffy three-square-metre windowless cubicle.

Olivetto’s guards, who numbered at least four according to neighbours, escaped after they were alerted by Hernández Norambuena.

After his arrest, the head of the group negotiated with police, and was allowed to make a phone call in exchange for the hostage’s release.

Olivetto, 50, who owns one of Brazil’s largest advertising companies, is one of the world’s most renowned advertising executives. The kidnappers had initially demanded a ransom of 10 million dollars, a sum that was eventually cut in half as negotiations progressed.

The case of Olivetto shares certain similarities with a December 1989 case for which five Chileans (members of Chile’s Movement of the Revolutionary Left), two Argentines, two Canadians and a Brazilian were brought to trial.

All of the foreign nationals convicted of the kidnapping were sent back to their home countries after serving nine to 11 years in prison in Brazil.

The victim of the 1989 kidnapping was business tycoon Abilio Diniz, the owner of Pan de Azúcar, Brazil’s largest chain of supermarkets. He was rescued by police after just a few days in captivity. The aim of his kidnappers was to obtain funds to send to leftist guerrillas in Central American nations still caught up at the time in civil conflicts.

There are many similarities. Both hostages were magnates from Sao Paulo, and both were held in rental houses in middle-class neighbourhoods. The most curious aspect is that both kidnappings were staged on Sep 11 – the day Pinochet seized power through a bloody coup in Chile in 1973.

The 1989 case, which occurred on the eve of presidential elections in Brazil, was seen as one of the factors leading to the defeat of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, of the leftist Workers’ Party (PT).

The kidnappers were displayed on TV wearing t-shirts with the PT slogan, and the conservative candidate, Fernando Collor de Mello – who ended up winning the elections – milked the situation in his publicity spots.

This time around, the PT has gotten the jump on possible maneuvers of that kind, stating that anyone who speculates on the political character of Olivetto’s kidnapping is doing so for electoral ends.

The Sao Paulo secretary of public security de Castro Abreu and police commissioner Giudice have also avoided comment on speculations in the press, which have blamed Olivetto’s kidnapping on guerrilla groups that are still active in neighbouring countries, like the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

In Brazil, one of the world’s leaders in kidnappings, Sao Paulo is facing an especially bad surge in the crime, with 45 cases so far this year, and 307 last year, five times more than in 2000.

But Giudice said he did not believe that Olivetto’s kidnappers had been involved in similar cases in the past. He explained that crimes carried out by foreigners have specific methodological and organisational characteristics, which were not seen in any of the kidnappings staged in recent years in Brazil.

Nor is it possible that they were somehow involved in the Diniz case in 1989, he said, because with the exception of the group’s leader, Hernández Norambuena, all of the suspects are under 30.

But it is clear that “the source of training is the same,” as indicated by the similar modus operandi, said Giudice.

Representatives of the FARC, which spreads information in Brazil about its struggle, principally through seminars organised in university settings, denied any link to the kidnapping, pointing out that the organisation has a strict rule not to carry out operations outside of Colombia.

The only Brazilian among those convicted in the 1989 kidnapping, Raimundo Costa Freire, 37, who spent a decade in prison and is now studying history, also said kidnappings aimed at gathering funds to support guerrilla groups in Latin America were unlikely today.

He noted that, with the exception of the groups in Colombia, insurgent organisations have all but disappeared in this region.

The peace-loving spirit of the left today was clearly expressed at the World Social Forum, a counter-summit to the World Economic Forum, which opened on Jan 31 and ended Tuesday in Porto Alegre, in southern Brazil. The organisers banned the FARC and the Basque separatist group ETA from taking part.

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