Abduction of Idol’s Father Rocks Mexico

MEXICO CITY —  The brazen kidnapping of the father of a beloved Mexican soccer star provoked outrage Thursday in a country nearly inured to a barrage of abductions, bank robberies and carjackings.

Jorge Campos, idol of soccer-mad Mexicans and a former Los Angeles Galaxy goalkeeper, flew back to Mexico on Thursday from a tournament in Hong Kong to take part in the search for his 65-year-old father, Alvaro Campos, who was abducted Wednesday.

Wishing the younger Campos well as he left Hong Kong, the coach of Mexico’s national soccer team conveyed the anger of many Mexicans. “Kidnapping is the worst crime because it attacks the emotions of the family,” Coach Manuel Lapuente said, “and in this case it’s worse still because it affects the entire soccer family.”

Even in a country hardened by the most gruesome violence, the kidnapping shook people deeply. The lofty Mexico City daily newspaper Reforma made the abduction its lead story and compared the kidnapping to the killing of basketball star Michael Jordan’s father in 1993. Radio stations carried hourly updates, and the tabloids all proffered variations of the immense headline in the newspaper Ovaciones: “ANGUISH.”

Jose Antonio Garcia, the president of Jorge Campos’ former Mexican League team, Atlante, told reporters, “It seems incredible that we have reached the level of an assault against an idol like Jorge Campos, who never has harmed anyone.”

The younger Campos, the slender national team goalkeeper known for his flashy uniforms, starred in Mexico’s World Cup efforts in 1994 and ’98. Campos plays professionally for the Chicago Fire.

Radio reports said that immediately after landing in Mexico City, the younger Campos met with officials from Mexico’s attorney general’s office. There was no immediate confirmation of the meeting from the attorney general’s office, according to Associated Press.

Mexican radio stations said the kidnappers had contacted the family to demand a multimillion-dollar ransom. Family members refused to comment.

Witnesses said six to eight men armed with assault rifles seized the elder Campos in midday sunshine from a soccer field named for his son on the outskirts of Acapulco, the tourist mecca that is also notorious for a wave of kidnappings in recent years.

Alvaro Campos’ kidnapping was the latest in a string of abductions of Mexican personalities or their relatives, including a son of ranchera music star Vicente Fernandez, who was held for four months last year until his family dropped a reported $3-million ransom from a small plane.

With police often implicated in kidnappings, victims’ families usually prefer to try to work out a ransom payment quietly. Servando Alanis, a police investigator in Guerrero state, where Acapulco is located, told reporters that the Campos family had not filed a formal complaint and “it seems there is a threat [of reprisals from the kidnappers] if we were to intervene.”

Alvaro Campos, a jovial, silver-haired rancher who usually wears shorts and a T-shirt, lives in a small farming community on the southern edge of Acapulco. Newspapers quoted community leader Ricardo Jimenez Anaya as saying the elder Campos told family members and friends that he had received anonymous phone calls since December threatening him with abduction, “but he said these were jokes, and that no one would do anything to him because everyone here loves him.”

Soaring crime in the wake of the country’s fierce 1995 recession has horrified Mexicans, especially here in the capital, where lawlessness and official corruption appear most entrenched. A survey of members of the National Confederation of Chambers of Commerce last year found that 27% of businesses nationwide had been robbed in the first half of 1998.

“Nobody escapes the phenomenon of crime in our country. This happens every day in our country. Enough already!” Televisa network anchorman Guillermo Ortega said in reporting Campos’ abduction Wednesday night.

Last May, three members of an elite anti-kidnapping unit in the border city of Ciudad Juarez were arrested on kidnapping charges. In the central state of Morelos, the chief of the anti-kidnapping unit was arrested while dumping a body from a car in the middle of the night, police said. He was charged with running a kidnapping gang.

One of the few police victories in a climate of widespread impunity for wrongdoers was the arrest last year of Daniel Arizmendi, who admitted to 20 kidnappings. In several abductions, he cut off the ears of his victims and sent them to relatives to terrify them into paying.

Police in Guadalajara also broke up the gang that carried out the abduction of Vicente Fernandez Jr. and other kidnappings. That gang typically cut off and delivered the victim’s fingertip as proof of the abduction.

Often, the victims are neither famous nor rich. Among less prominent cases, a truck driver paid separate ransoms to rival gangs that both claimed to have kidnapped his teenage child, and schoolmates grabbed a 12-year-old at gunpoint for a $500 ransom. And a growing number of cases of fraudulent “self-kidnappings” were reported last year.

But cases of kidnappings and assaults of prominent Mexicans get the most attention, such as the 1996 snatching of four children of former Finance Secretary Antonio Ortiz Mena. The girls were held for a week until a ransom was paid.