LATIN AMERICA: The Boom of the Kidnapping ‘Industry’

By Humberto Márquez Reprint | | Print |

Humberto Márquez*

CARACAS, Aug 19 2003 (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.