Jean Henold Buteau's wife listened frantically to the brusque voice on the other end of the phone: We've got your husband. Give us US$1 million or start planning his funeral.
Then she heard his screams as the kidnappers tortured her bound and hooded husband, crushing the tips of his fingers and earlobes with steel pliers and burning his feet with melted plastic juice bottles.
Buteau's 20-hour abduction in April was part of a rash of kidnappings adding to the misery in violence-torn Haiti.
An average of four people are kidnapped each day by politically aligned street gangs, drug traffickers, crooked police and criminal deportees from the US, officials say.
"I was thinking, `Thank God my mother is dead because she couldn't take this,'" said Buteau, a physician and leader of a center-left political party who was released after his family paid a ransom well below the amount demanded. "They were very, very brutal."
The kidnappings are the latest trend in relentless violence that one UN official called "an urban war" to destabilize Haiti ahead of fall elections to fill a power vacuum after a revolt toppled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide last year.
At least 130 people were kidnapped in the capital of Port-au-Prince in April, a big jump over previous months, UN officials have said. Precise statistics were not available for the previous months, or for last month or this month.
The victims range from wealthy business owners pulled out of luxury vehicles on busy streets to working-class Haitians snatched from poor neighborhoods and held for a few hundred dollars.
Foreigners are also targets.
On Friday, an Italian woman, Gigliola Martino, was kidnapped in the capital and released unharmed later overnight, the Italian Foreign Ministry said. Italian news agency ANSA reported that Martino, 65, has been living in Haiti for about 30 years with her husband and two children.
The incident came days after a Canadian woman was kidnapped from her home and reportedly held for US$300,000. She was freed Wednesday, but it was unclear if a ransom was paid. At least six foreigners have been kidnapped in recent months.
"We are facing a kind of terrorism," said Ann-Marie Issa, a member of a US-backed council of business leaders, academics and others who helped choose Haiti's interim government and still monitor it. "When we go out in the morning we don't know if we'll come home."
Many wealthier Haitians, who had been relatively insulated from violence, are leaving the nation or fleeing to the countryside, Issa said. Several business owners have been forced to close up shop, laying off workers and perpetuating Haiti's cycle of poverty, she said.
Increased violence prompted the US Peace Corps to pull its 16 volunteers out of Haiti this week, three weeks after the US State Department warned US citizens against traveling here and ordered nonessential US personnel to leave.
Haitian officials blame much of the kidnappings on well-armed pro-Aristide street gangs, but say drug traffickers, corrupt police and an influx of criminal deportees from the US are also involved.
"Some of these guys were not even born in Haiti, but their parents were Haitians," interim Prime Minister Gerard Latortue said recently, urging U.S. authorities to stop sending back criminals of Haitian descent.
A 7,400-strong UN peacekeeping force is patrolling volatile slums of the capital and parts of the countryside but says it can do little to combat kidnappings.
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