MEXICO: Sick and Tired of Rising Crime and Impunity

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Diego Cevallos

MEXICO CITY, Jun 24 2004 (IPS) - Sara Patrón, who was kidnapped for several hours in her car and beaten by her kidnappers in the Mexican capital, said she lives in constant fear in a country where the police and criminals sometimes appear to be on the same side.
      ”I didn’t report the kidnapping,” she told IPS, ”…because the criminals told me they were in contact with the police and that if I dared to talk, they would kill my five-year-old daughter.”

Sara Patrón, who was kidnapped for several hours in her car and beaten by her kidnappers in the Mexican capital, said she lives in constant fear in a country where the police and criminals sometimes appear to be on the same side.

”I didn’t report the kidnapping to the police,” she told IPS, ”first of all because I was terrified, and in a really bad physical condition, but also because the criminals told me they were in contact with the police and that if I dared to talk, they would kill my five-year-old daughter.

”Just imagine, that’s too much to deal with,” said Patrón, 35, who lives in a middle-class neighbourhood in Mexico City and works at a clothing store.

Patrón and thousands of other people who have lived through traumatic experiences as victims of crime or are simply fed up with the rise in kidnappings and robberies will march Sunday in the streets of Mexico City to demand real answers to the problem of rising crime rates.

The march was called early this month by civil society organisations in response to a spate of kidnappings in the Mexican capital, which boasts the unsavoury record of 21 crimes an hour, 93 percent of which are never clarified.

According to surveys, more than 500,000 people are expected to come out on Sunday, dressed in white or black, to march in silence.

But popular leftist Mayor Andrés López Obrador sees the march as a plot by the right to undermine his government – a stance that has drawn indignant responses from crime victims, while perplexing some analysts.

”What’s going on with López Obrador? Why is it so hard for him to understand that more and more of us are simply no longer willing to sit with our arms by our sides waiting to get assaulted, raped, kidnapped or murdered?” wondered writer Germán Dehesa, an outspoken critic of conservative and right-wing positions.

By contrast, former presidential candidate Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, one of Mexico’s most prominent leftist leaders and a fellow member of López Obrador’s Party of the Democratic Revolution, said the march was totally justified, and expressed his support and respect for the demonstration.

In the past 10 years, an estimated 15,000 kidnappings have been committed in Mexico, but only 5,300 were reported, due to a widespread lack of trust and confidence in the police and other authorities, and the impunity that surrounds a vast majority of crimes, says a study by the Confederación Patronal (the Employers’ Association).

According to official statistics, 50 people have been killed by their kidnappers this year alone. And unlike in the 1990s, kidnapping victims no longer exclusively come from the ranks of the wealthy, but include people from the middle-class and even lower middle-class.

Of the 2,165 kidnappings registered by the authorities between 2000 and 2003, 29 percent of the victims were students and 23 percent small shopkeepers and business owners, states a report by the Attorney-General’s Office.

Local civil and business associations say Mexico ranks second in Latin America in terms of the number of kidnappings, after war-torn Colombia.

Of every 100 crimes committed in Mexico, just 25 are reported to the police, due to public mistrust as well as the complicated requirements and paperwork involved in reporting a crime.

Of those 25 crimes, fewer than five are actually investigated, and only two lead to the perpetrator’s arrest, according to the Secretariat of Public Security.

In addition, active-duty or retired police are implicated in many kidnappings and robberies.

”There may be people from the right, the left or whatever in Sunday’s march. But the demonstration will be of all of us who are sick and tired of crime,” Patrón told IPS.

One evening in February, as she pulled up to her house at around 20:00, Patrón was threatened by three people carrying revolvers, who quickly climbed in her car, where they cursed, beat and kicked her and threw her in the back seat.

Her kidnappers then began to drive around, using her cell-phone to call her family and demand a 10,000 dollar ransom.

Six hours later, Patrón was released with a broken shoulder and nose, while her kidnappers fled in another car with 6,000 dollars that had been deposited in a garbage can in a park, as agreed on with her family.

”I live in terror, and I’m seriously thinking of leaving the country, because I have a daughter who doesn’t deserve all this,” she said.

Surveys show that 10 out of 25 Mexico City households have been victims of crime, and 80 percent of the city’s more than 20 million inhabitants feel unsafe.

Lack of security ”conditions lifestyles”, says the report ‘Equity, Development and Citizenship’ by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

The widespread sensation of ”insecurity” leads people to limit their movements in public spaces, avoid going out at night, and stay indoors, says the study, which adds that social groups and classes tend to stick together and look at everyone else – anyone who is different – with suspicion.

Police in the capital and neighbouring states, under pressure from the growing public anger, began to meet this week to discuss joint law enforcement actions.

Meanwhile, Mayor López Obrador continues to argue that behind the social pressure are groups that want to inflict damage on him, because he is the favourite potential presidential candidate in polls focusing on the 2006 elections.

”Seeing a plot in the justified demand for security is terrible, even sinister, because it ignores reality and ignores the fact that the main duty of a State is to guarantee coexistence, which is not occurring in this country, and especially not in the capital,” political analyst Miguel Ramírez commented to IPS.

President Vicente Fox has taken a different stance, expressing his support for the demonstration, and urging Congress to approve proposed reforms of the criminal justice system introduced by the government in March.

Among other things, the reforms would stiffen sentences for a number of crimes, introduce oral, public trials to bolster transparency, restructure public security institutions, create a constitutionally independent federal prosecutor’s office, and professionalise criminal defence lawyers.

The reforms would entail the modification of more than 20 constitutional clauses, amend 17 laws, and create eight new laws, including one on criminal justice for adolescents, which would reduce the age of penal responsibility from 18 to 12 years.

Several bills have also been introduced in parliament that would make kidnapping a federal crime punishable by tougher sentences.

The high crime rates, perceptions of insecurity, and mistrust of public institutions have fuelled the growth of the private security industry, which does not escape, however, suspicions of ties with the world of crime.

In the past three years, the number of private security firms has climbed from 2,332 to 5,140 in Mexico.

Kroll Associates, an international consultancy that offers protection and advice in kidnapping cases, will bill around seven million dollars this year in Mexico, compared to 250,000 dollars in 1998, when it first began to operate in the country.

”When we opened the office, we only had foreign clients. But today more than half of our clients are Mexicans, and we have grown 1,000 percent since 1998,” said David Robillard, senior director for Kroll Associates in Mexico City.

Another company, Consultores Asociados de Seguridad, estimates that the local private security market totals more than 800 million dollars a year.