Quickie kidnappings

TWO cars pulled up as a university student and her boyfriend were leaving a party in Caracas last December. Four men wrestled the student into one, her boyfriend into the other. “They drove around the city and negotiated with us over the phone while my daughter sat in the back seat,” says the student’s mother, Martha González, a teacher. The car never left Caracas; the abduction lasted just two hours. A ransom was agreed; Mrs González’s daughter and her boyfriend were freed.

Classic kidnappings are elaborately planned, with rich victims and prolonged negotiations. If all goes well for the miscreants, large ransoms are paid at the end. In Latin America such set-piece kidnappings are increasingly outnumbered by swifter abductions with lower pay-offs. In Venezuela, where the number of abductions is rising, “express kidnappings” are the most common sort, according to the Venezuelan Violence Observatory (OVV), a think-tank based in Caracas.

Elsewhere, the total number of kidnappings appears to be dropping while the proportion of express abductions is probably rising. In Colombia the number of snatches dropped from 3,572 in 2000 to 277 last year, in part because the FARC, a leftist guerrilla group, has largely pulled out of the business. The value of ransoms has fallen in tandem, say police. In some Brazilian cities “lightning kidnappings”, in which victims...

from The Economist: The Americas http://ift.tt/1MpoEkv