Mexico's kidnap capital: TJ
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/subscriber/local/story/3752...
'Tijuana is going crazy' as abductions, fear soar
Oct 29 2006
By Richard Marosi
TIJUANA, Mexico -- One sunny morning last year, a middle-age businessman was turning off the Via Rapida toward work when a convoy of black vehicles
slipped behind his car. They caught up with him in his office parking lot and a dozen heavily armed men spilled out, threw him in a van and sped off
into the gritty sprawl.
Within minutes, his family received the ransom demand -- $1 million.
A week later, hands trembling, the businessman's brother said the family still didn't have the money.
"It looks like you don't love your own flesh and blood," sneered the kidnapper he spoke to over a cell phone walkie-talkie.
Ankles bound, hands cuffed so that his palms were clasped as if in prayer, the businessman was by now stuck on a smelly sofa in a safe house,
whispering Our Fathers and Hail Marys while his captors smoked marijuana and giggled at telenovelas.
"You're playing games," the kidnapper said. "If you don't hurry, I'm going to kill him and throw his body on your doorstep."
The businessman's ordeal -- he was eventually rescued -- marked another event in a two-year crime wave that has turned this border city into one of
the kidnap capitals of the world.
The targets, typically middle- and upper-class businessmen or their sons, often are snatched in broad daylight by organized crime rings masquerading
as federal police squads. One man was grabbed as he left a circus with his kids.
North American tourists are rarely targets, so the kidnappings don't get much attention across the border. They usually aren't reported to police,
many of whom are working with the criminal rings, according to federal and state authorities.
Estimates of the number of kidnappings this year in the Tijuana area range from 77 to 120, according to business groups, civic leaders and private
security firms. The year before, they say, there were 60.
Tijuana may now have the most kidnappings in the world outside of the Middle East, said Thomas Clayton, chairman of Clayton Consultants Inc., a global
private security company.
"Tijuana is going crazy," Clayton said.
Rarely a day passes without a brazen kidnapping or murder making headlines.
On major thoroughfares, billboards show photos of kidnap victims and plead for help finding them. In a recent newspaper survey, nearly one-third of
respondents said a friend or relative had been kidnapped. Tijuana Mayor Jorge Hank Rhon recently said 10 friends of his have been kidnapped. The
deteriorating situation has prompted Tijuana Bishop Rafael Romo Munoz and civic leaders to call for the Mexican military to patrol the streets.
Meanwhile, hundreds of families, some owners of landmark businesses and institutions, have fled across the border to live in upscale neighbourhoods in
San Diego County.
Other Mexican cities have suffered waves of kidnappings -- most notably Mexico City in the 1990s. But Tijuana's kidnapping spree is uniquely brutal
because violent drug cartel members are involved. Victims in Tijuana are more likely to be killed.
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