Life is cheap in the world’s kidnap capital
Jorge Gonzalez’s specialty is kidnapping.
The gang he leads gives a victim’s family and friends only 72 hours to come up with the ransom. If they don’t or cannot pay, the victim is murdered.
“It’s not the best way to earn a living, but it is the easiest,” said Gonzalez, who for obvious reasons would not give his real name. “If the families don’t pay up, we eliminate that person.”
I asked Gonzalez how he justified killing people he did not know and who had never done him harm.
“It is not if this is right or wrong. I don’t give a s--t about that,” he said, his voice devoid of emotion. “They’ve seen our faces so we can’t afford to let them go.”
He also wanted me to know “a lot have died on our side, too.”
I met the career kidnapper after I asked a Venezuelan friend about the horrific crime rate and how bad it was in the dirt-poor shanty town where he lived. He replied perhaps I would be interested in meeting a childhood friend of his who ran a kidnapping business.
I have arranged to meet Gonzalez at his hideout in a Caracas slum. But an old friend, now posted to Venezuela as a diplomat, urged me to call off the rendezvous or meet in a public place so I would not be kidnapped, too. Caracas has been dubbed “the kidnap capital of the world,” with about five kidnappings a day.
Against my expectations, Gonzalez agreed to meet on neutral turf.
Without a trace of irony, he suggested a downtown park across the street from the jail where police keep their most dangerous prisoners awaiting trial.
A diminutive, slightly paunchy man with bronze skin, Gonzalez showed up on time. He was wearing faded blue jeans, a threadbare baseball cap and a bulky sweatshirt that only partially obscured the sidearm he was clearly packing.
Throughout the 20 minutes we sat beside each other on a concrete bench, he never once made direct eye contact as he nervously surveyed our surroundings, looking for potentially deadly threats.
Gonzalez began by explaining “the market.”
He targeted Venezuela’s middle classes, rather than the rich. Going after the rich invited additional police scrutiny or worse, heavily armed private guards driving armoured vehicles. For the same reasons and because they seldom had Venezuelan bank accounts that could be quickly emptied, it did not make economic sense to kidnap foreigners.
There was also the likely complication that “when a foreign government gets involved, the police here really start asking questions,” he said.
Before deciding whether to kidnap someone, gang members followed their movements closely for about a month to understand how and where they lived, worked and played.
This was not only to figure out the best time and place to grab them, but also to find out whether their kin were likely to be able to cough up a ransom of 100,000 to 200,000 bolivars about $300 to $600 on the black market ($16,000 US to $32,000 at the official exchange rate).
This may not seem like much money in return for a human life, but it illustrates the wretchedness of Venezuela’s economic situation. The country depends on oil for 95 per cent of its foreign exchange and has been sent reeling by the catastrophic drop in oil prices.
Canada’s Department Foreign Affairs warns travellers to Venezuela to exercise “a high degree of caution due to the significant level of serious crime, such as murder, kidnapping and armed robbery.” Hotels strongly advise guests to take a taxi, even if only going one or two blocks away during broad daylight.
There were 90 murders in the Venezuelan capital during the first six days of January and 5,200 murders last year.
That translates into an astonishing Baghdad-like homicide rate of 134 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2014. Among those killed were 132 cops.
A damning report by the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security concluded Venezuela is “the most weaponized place in the world,” with one gun for every two people. There were as many as 50 carjackings every day in Caracas.
It attributed “the country’s pervasive criminality (to a) poorly paid, poorly trained, underequipped and often corrupt police force; an inefficient and politicized judicial system; a system of violent and largely overcrowded prisons that are under the control of prison gang leaders; and countrywide availability of millions of illegal weapons.”
None of this was news to Gonzalez, of course.
“We have lots of contact with the police,” he said. “They tip us off if anything is going wrong. We pay for that and give them a cut to stay quiet.”
Gonzalez said he had been “raised rough,” especially after his father was murdered in a gangland dispute. The son began his own life of crime when he was 14, served time in prison and had been “dedicated to the life for 20 years now.”
He made it clear he was no Robin Hood. The only ones who benefited from his ruthless line of work were his wife and their young children.
“I feel nothing in particular for my neighbours, but I respect them because I know that they have hard lives” was the closest Gonzalez came to saying anything sentimental.
It was far too late, he said, for him to abandon kidnapping, particularly when Venezuela’s economic future was so grim.
Before getting up and ambling away without a backward glance, the unrepentant cold-blooded kidnapper and murderer concluded the interview by sharing his view, “This country is screwed and it’s not going to get better.”