The king of anti-kidnapping

Los Angeles Times ^ | 24 May 2007 | Sonni Efron

[Kitten Festival]

Colombia has its human rights problems, but in one respect it's a poster child for law-enforcement progress. Once the kidnapping capital of the world, Colombia claims to have slashed its snatching-for-profit business by 88% since President Alvaro Uribe took office in 2002. The man who may know the kidnapping business personally is Uribe's vice president, Francisco Santos, who was snatched in 1990 and held hostage by drug kingpin Pablo Escobar.

Escobar, head of the Medellin cartel, was seeking to pressure the Colombian government not to extradite him to the United States to face drug charges. Santos was a young editor at El Tiempo, the country's leading newspaper, which was owned by his prominent family. He spent the next eight months chained to a bed. (The kidnapping later became the subject of a book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.)

After his release, Santos founded two groups to help kidnapping victims and their families, and to press Colombian society to resist extortion and to demand change. As vice president, Latin America's most famous hostage has been a key player in the fight against the guerrillas and drug barons who made Colombia a scarier place for many than Lebanon's Bekaa Valley. Colombia has now been asked by Paraguay for help in combating its own burgeoning kidnapping problem—a phenomenon that's metastasizing across Latin America, particularly to Mexico and Brazil. It's perhaps revealing that no one in Baghdad or Washington has asked Santos for his views on the lessons that Colombia's experience has to offer for the growing abduction problem in the Iraq, where kidnapping has become a key tool of politics, profit and terror.

[Kitten Festival]

Great story. So the vice president was kidnapped by Pablo Escobar, the foreign minister was kidnapped by the FARC Marxist narcoterrorists and President Uribe was the target of something like 100 assassination attempts. One wonders what the Colombia cabinet's war stories are like when they sip scotch in the evening after work.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

If nobody ever paid a ransom, kidnappings would cease.

[monday]

“If nobody ever paid a ransom, kidnappings would cease.”

You could also execute all the relatives of kidnappers that were caught. This would also cause kidnappings to cease.

[HKMk23]

You could also execute all the relatives of kidnappers that were caught.

IIRC, this is precisely the tactic the Soviets used to quash kidnapping of their people in the Middle East. If memory serves me, they had exactly one prolific kindapping, during which Moscow publicized photographs of the kidnappers' extended family members along with a "Give us back our guy, or ELSE..." message. Their man was freed, uharmed, within 24hrs.

[-=SoylentSquirrel=-]

Look out Columbia, now that Wolfowitz is on the ropes, Kitten Festival is looking for a new target!

Seriously, if not for your barrage of posts regarding the World Bank Debacle, I never would have known. It certainly does not get a lot of airplay in the MSM