Mexico tends to be cited as the world's second-worst place for kidnapping, after Colombia. This calls for some perspective. While Colombia has been reporting an average of 2,700 kidnappings a year in the six years to 2002, Mexico has been coming down from a level three to four times lower.
Statistics on kidnapping are, of course, notoriously inaccurate. They build upon reported cases, when one of the features of this particular crime is that a large number go unreported, for fear of reprisal - or, in the case of victims from the middle-to-low income strata, lack of trust in the authorities. This, however, tends to be true across the board.
Not so long ago a well-known international security firm estimated kidnappings in Mexico in 2001 at somewhere between 1,700 and 2,200, and those in Colombia at 2,000-2,500. Oddly, the Colombian figure was lower than what the government reported (3,041) - and governments do not tend to magnify such things. In Mexico, the business association Coparmex, which monitors kidnappings, reported 221 cases in 2001 (but their list is considered highly selective).
The Mexican organised crime team, Unidad Especializada de Delincuencia Organizada (UEDO), put the figure at 732. This does not include the so-called 'express' kidnappings, which involve holding the victim for less than a day, more often to raid automated tellers (twice; before and after midnight) than to obtain more sizable ransom. The PGR reckons there were about 20 such kidnappings in 2001; private estimates go all the way up to a hard-to-imagine 10 a day.
UEDO posts results
In any case, since December 2000, UEDO has broken up 28 kidnap rings and arrested 177 alleged members. As a result, the number of kidnappings has shrunk from 732 in 2001 to 343 last year.
UEDO chief José Luis Santiago expects a further shrinkage of about 60% this year, and says he expects kidnappings to have virtually disappeared from the Mexican crime scene within two more years.
As recently as 8 June his agency broke up another kidnap ring, the 5-member Los Solís gang, believed to have started up in January. This gang was typical of the kind of low-level kidnapping that has been proliferating in Mexico: they picked their victims from among neighbours and acquaintances, even relatives. After exacting fairly modest ransoms, they then set them free on busy Mexico city thoroughfares.
As in other crime-related areas, Mexico has had serious problems with police involvement in the kidnap 'industry' - though of late none as notorious as that of Armando Martínez Salgado, the head of the Morelos state anti-kidnap unit caught in 1998 as he was trying to dispose of the body of one of the many people he had himself kidnapped.
The cleansing of the various police forces has been proceeding apace over the past few years. The PGR reports that since 2000 sanctions have been doled out to 2,606 of its employees, among which were 536 agents of the defunct federal judicial police (PJF), which was replaced by the US-trained Agencia Federal de Investigaciones (AFI) after a string of massive purges failed to rid it of corruption.
End of preview - This article contains approximately 551 words.
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