A "Virtual Kidnapping"

Right before I took off to Brazil, my spanish teacher Pato told me about a "virtual kidnapping" her family experienced the night before. It's a weird story, worth telling.

Kidnapping is definitely an issue in Latin America. Colombia is famous for it, and Mexico has had more of it in recent years. And since the Crisis -- the economic collapse of 2001/2 -- there has been a bit of it here in Argentina as well. Just today the TV news was reporting on a kidnapping of a daughter of a business owner. I'm not sure but it seems that although the victim is still held hostage, they have identified the kidnapper, a 24-year old male. Or maybe they somehow just figured out that he was 24 years old?

Anyway, about two weeks ago, Pato's father received a telephone call from someone claiming to have Pato's sister held hostage. The person wanted 30,000 pesos, I think (about $10,000 US dollars) -- something like that. Pato's father handled the situation relatively poorly. He said he did not have the money, so somehow the person on the phone got the father to give out the phone number and address of Pato, the sister of the person supposedly held hostage. The perpetrator then called Pato's number, and Pato's boyfriend Mark, a brit with so-so spanish, picked up the phone. He naturally could hardly understand the person, so not much progress was made, and I didn't really get the story of how that call ended. Pato was at school, and when she came home the police were there talking to Mark and I guess waiting for her.

As it turned out, the other sister was also safely in a class somewhere, and so no kidnapping had actually taken place. It was a fraud kidnapping, "un secuestro virtual" as Pato put it. But still, now the person has Pato's address and phone number. Not that that's much of a threat, it's easy to get someone's address and phone number. But still, it would certainly make me uneasy to be a target of this sort of thing.

It seems to be generally agreed that the two big concerns among people here in Buenos Aires and probably in Argentina as a whole are inflation and security. Prices are going up up up, and so making ends meet is harder and harder. But the rise of crime, especially violent crime, really seems to be the big problem to me, the problem that will have greater repercussions if it doesn't stop. People will become more and more wary, more and more distrustful. I think people are already more wary than they were two or three years ago. And then also if crime really spirals out of control, there will be support for rougher and rougher policing tactics, more authoritarian behavior on the part of the authorities. And, god forbid, the military might come to be seen as the best hope for maintaining "order".

This is the sad history of much of Latin America -- fluctuations between more representative governments and nasty military dictatorships. Let's hope the cycle doesn't repeat itself here.