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Despairing families give up on police help after Mexican kidnapping cases

In a calm voice, Isabel Miranda Wallace explained how her son’s kidnapping transformed her family into a team of sleuths: trailing suspects, taking on false identities, physically capturing kidnappers and even digging up a body.

“In Mexico, authorities don’t care about kidnappers or the families of kidnap victims. They never do anything,” Wallace said in her gated home in southern Mexico City, guarded by three armed police since she escaped an assassination attempt last month.

In the three long years since her 31-year-old son Hugo was snatched, the search for his captors has taken over Wallace’s life. She stopped her work as a teacher on July 12, 2005, the day after he disappeared.

“Why do I continue? Because I think that any mother who has her son stolen from her has to look for him,” the 57-year-old said.

With kidnappings at an epidemic pace — 323 cases in Mexico City in the first half of this year, official figures show, and 400 according to a rights group, compared with 438 for the whole of last year — Mexico has surpassed Colombia as the world’s kidnapping center, Dutch NGO Pax Christi says.

The federal government has proposed new measures to tackle kidnapping in recent weeks, including tougher sentences, and a national security summit on kidnapping is scheduled on Thursday.

But for families affected, there is little patience or trust for state action.

Wallace’s family’s efforts led to the arrest of four members of the kidnapping gang, and the leader was a former police officer, Cesar Freyre.

Although the case is extreme, it reflects widespread frustration with the impunity kidnappers exhibit, from whisking off victims in a taxi to empty their bank accounts in “express” kidnappings, to fake kidnappings involving a telephone call and a lie that a relative is being held, to brutal murders after ransoms are paid.

“They say that in Mexico there’s a kidnapping for every level of society,” said lawyer Max Morales, a kidnapping and security consultant for 20 years.

Kidnappings are also growing more violent.

The recent high-profile kidnapping and assassination teenager Fernando Marti — abducted on his way to school in Mexico City with a driver and bodyguard — in which police were allegedly involved, unleashed a new wave of public anger.

Of 8,000 abductions reported across the country since 1994, the National Council for Public Security and Penal Justice says 700 victims died although their families had paid a ransom.

Some blame the violence on the involvement of drug gangs seeking extra money to survive a government crackdown begun in 2006.

But experts say it is also a natural progression as kidnappers compete for more money and renown, cutting off an extra ear or finger from a victim or, in the Marti case, leaving behind a signature flower with the victim’s body.

Police involvement is also deep-rooted.

“Today, in 70 or 80 percent of cases, police or ex-police belong to kidnapping groups in Mexico City,” Morales says.

Alejandro Marti, the father of Fernando, defended his decision to hire a private negotiator to help find his son, who was abducted at a fake police roadblock.
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