First Stop in the New World: the Reality of Crime
This week MexicoReporter.com is publishing a series of extracts from David Lida’s book “First Stop in the New World,” which has just come out in paperback. The book is divided between long chapters that deal with topics of great importance in Mexico City (crime, inequality, food, sex and even shopping), and shorter chapters that provide vignettes on certain sectors of the city.
Lida is an accomplished author and journalist who has lived in Mexico City for the last 15 years. He has written a number of books, which you can read about here on his website.
One of the longest chapters in First Stop in the New World is called “Who’s Afraid of Mexico City?” It is an in-depth examination of the perceptions and realities of the crime problem in Mexico City. The following is an excerpt from that chapter.
David Lida. Photographed by Federico Gama
Jacobo
For about ten years there was a man who was known as the “go-to guy” in the Jewish community in case of a kidnapping. Before he retired from this activity, he negotiated 88 kidnaps, and in each the victim was returned alive. In 76 of the cases, at least some of the gang members were arrested and convicted. Due to his request for anonymity, I’ll call this man Jacobo.
He is about 70, slim, bald-headed and morbidly witty. I met him in his “office” – an elegant café off a hotel lobby. Jacobo blames the wave of kidnapping in Mexico to television coverage. He refers specifically to the news about the leader of a kidnapping ring named Daniel Arizmendi López, who before his capture was known as el mochaorejas (the earchopper) because of his proclivity for sending the ears of his victims to accelerate ransom payments.
“Before him,” said Jacobo, “a criminal would stick up a grocery store or rob people on the street, get 500 or 1000 pesos and then, after a hard day’s work, go home and watch TV. Thousands of these guys saw the reports about how much Arizmendi made and said to themselves, ‘I’m in the wrong business.’”
Jacobo refused to offer any details about how a kidnap is negotiated, explaining that if a kidnapper read this book, he would be tipped off to strategy. “How much is a life worth?” he asked. “Buying and selling shirts is an easy business. You know if you buy a shirt for ten pesos and sell it for twenty, you’ve made a ten-peso profit. If you sell it for nine, you’ve lost a peso. But how much a life is worth is the business of kidnap negotiation. They’ve got a person and they want to sell him. The family wants to buy him. It’s all about money. It’s not personal. They’re just trying to move merchandise.”
The father of another kidnap victim – whose son was returned to him for about $20,000 after the intervention of the AFI, Mexico’s equivalent to the FBI – was willing to go into more detail. He drew a triangle on a piece of paper. The line at the bottom represented the passage of time. The line on the left pointing upward symbolized the mounting pressure, both for the kidnappers and the victims’ families. The line pointing downward on the right stood for the diminishing financial expectations of the kidnappers. At a certain point, a convergence is reached for a sum of money.
If the family of the victim agrees to pay the first amount requested by the kidnappers, then the criminals will decide that they’ve asked for too little and demand more. As painful as it may be when the life of a loved one is at stake, professionals urge the victims’ families to start with an extremely low number, so the final price won’t be usurious.
“Violence is always a part of it, verbal or physical,” said Jacobo. “You can’t be a polite kidnapper or no one will take you seriously.” The longest period of captivity for one of the kidnaps he negotiated was 100 days, and the shortest 24 hours. The smallest amount of money ever handed over was about $5,000, and the greatest close to $100,000.
“And three fingers,” he added.
Category: culture
[...] practice, especially for immigrants. Different classes of people receive different consideration, First Stop in the New World: the Reality of Crime – mexicoreporter.com 06/11/2009 This week MexicoReporter.com is publishing a series of [...]