| | |  Americas & Beyond 
US Families Fear Phone Call From Mexico’s Cartels
 Meribah Knight - New York Times
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August 01, 2010
| | Chicago is home to a large Mexican population, many from the state of Michoacán. (Jose More/Chicago News Cooperative) | |
T was lucky he heard his cellphone ring over the racket of his construction equipment as he worked outside in the suburbs last September. “We have your father,” said a man in a voice T recalled as eerily calm. “Try to get the money together as soon as you can so that your dad can be freed.”
It was the call T — a naturalized citizen who emigrated here from Mexico 19 years ago — had hoped he would never receive. (His name is being withheld because he fears for his safety.)
His father, a farmer in Michoacán had been kidnapped by La Familia Michoacana, a drug cartel. The cartel is known for its rapid rise to power in Mexico’s drug war and the bloody enforcement of its authority with beheadings and notes of terror attached to its victims.
T tried to explain to the caller that he did not have enough money for the ransom — a carefully calculated five-figure amount based on the perceived assets of his father’s five sons. The man replied: “All right, well, if you don’t love your dad, then that’s fine. We’ll just kill him.”
During the four days it took to negotiate the release of his father, the depth and scope of La Familia’s influence — reaching from Michoacán in southwestern Mexico to Chicago — was brought into sharp focus. With their sophisticated intelligence network, the kidnappers knew that T had four brothers and two sisters living in the United States, and that he usually worked seven days a week at his landscaping construction business.
T was the perfect target to help fuel the cartel’s deadly operations in Mexico and, by extension, its drug distribution in this country: He had money and a large family.
Stories like T’s and the fear they generate are becoming all too familiar for those with family back in Michoacán. “We are afraid to go to Mexico, yet our families are suffering,” said José Luis Gutiérrez, director of Casa Michoacán and assistant director of the National Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Communities.
Of the 1.2 million Hispanics in Cook County, 78 percent identify themselves as Mexican, and according to 2008 census data they make up the second-largest Mexican community in the United States. The largest segment of Chicago’s Mexican population — nearly 15 percent according to 2007 data supplied by the Mexican Consulate — is from Michoacán (pronounced mee-sho-ah-KAHN), La Familia’s home state.
Like other cartels, La Familia uses the state’s port city of Lázaro Cárdenas to import cocaine and other drugs from Peru and Colombia and relay them to its networks. La Familia also produces large amounts of methamphetamine in the desolate and seemingly lawless Sierra Madre range, said Mr. Gutiérrez in an interview at Casa Michoacán in Pilsen, an umbrella organization for Michoacán clubs and associations.
Chicago and Michoacán are more than 1,500 miles apart. Mexicans here maintain close contact with families in Mexico, which makes it easier for La Familia’s extended network to single out immigrants who own businesses, and to make extortion threats against their operations and relatives in Mexico.
“Nobody wants to talk about it, but everybody is afraid of it,” said Mr. Gutiérrez. “We feel powerless because from here there is nothing we can do about it.”
Xóchitl Bada, a professor of Latin American studies at the University of Illinois-Chicago, said families in Chicago “know they are at the mercy of a very corrupt justice system” in Mexico. “And if you are thousands of miles away,” she said, “of course your fear gets magnified.”
Agustín Pradillo, a spokesman for the Mexican Consulate in Chicago, said the consulate had not received phone calls from families here about kidnappings or violence in Mexico.
Those problems are “not our specialization,” Mr. Pradillo said. “We try to help the people here with the problems they have here, because in Mexico they have the authorities. They are in charge of this.”
But Mr. Gutiérrez acknowledged that violence and security were the main concerns for Mexican immigrants.
Ties to Michoacán are strong. It is the only state in Mexico that allows emigrants to vote in local elections, and it maintains closer ties with them than most other states, experts and community members said. The state has also provided financial assistance to Casa Michoacán.
Leonel Godoy, Michoacán’s governor, denied that the state had a problem with drug-related crimes. During a visit to Chicago in June for events celebrating the bicentennial of Mexican independence and the centennial of the Mexican revolution, he was asked about cartel activities in Michoacán.
“It’s a lie that there is violence in Michoacán,” Mr. Godoy said. “Life in Michoacán is normal.”
Tourism was up 9 percent in 2009, he said.
But Michoacán has an Office of Kidnappings and Extortion in Morelia, the state capital, where the phone is answered with a simple “Sequestros!” (“Kidnappings!”).
Jonathan Arredono, an employee of the office, said that investigations were opened there, but that many people did not call to report kidnappings, “because of disgrace, fear or to avoid being put in more danger.”
In Chicago in early June, at another event promoting the Michoacán community in the city, Jesús Garibay García, a Mexican senator, talked in an interview about La Familia’s and other cartels’ strongholds.
“The gangs who make these drugs are now all over the world,” Mr. Garibay García said. “No family, whether here in the U.S. or in Mexico, is safe from falling victim to it. And if we ever want to help in resolving this issue, we have to recognize that we do have these issues.”
On Nov. 20, two months after T received the call about his father, federal authorities indicted 15 people connected to the Chicago drug-distribution cell of La Familia. Investigators seized 550 pounds of cocaine and $8 million in cash, largely in the suburbs, including Berwyn, Bolingbrook, Hickory Hills, Joliet, Justice and Oak Lawn. The raids were part of a multiagency investigation that began in 2007 and focused on La Familia’s network in the United States.
Most experts and outreach workers believe that the arrests show that La Familia intends to expand its base in Chicago’s suburbs, not in the city itself.
“I don’t see it in Chicago as anything more than isolated examples of the power of these cartels,” said John Hagedorn, a professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago, who studies Chicago gangs.
Cartels are exerting more pressure on local gangs in an effort to control drug distribution in the Chicago area, he said, but so far it has not been successful.
“But Chicago is too far away and the gangs are too established, so I don’t think it’s a strategy that’s going to work,” he said.
For T, that distinction is meaningless. He said that his four phone calls over four days to negotiate the price of his father’s release were peppered with encouragement from the kidnappers: “Try harder,” “Put your all into it,” “You can do it.” Finally he was able to speak to his father, who tried to sound composed. He told T that he was fine, but to please hurry. He said he was sure they would kill him if a deal wasn’t reached.
T said he called his local municipal office in Michoacán for help. A secretary assured him that someone would follow up, but no one did.
“There is so much corruption,” T said. “Once I saw that I wasn’t going to get any help, I realized it would be easier and quicker to get the money together.”
With loans from family members and friends in Michoacán, T said that at the end of the four days he arranged for a friend to deposit the ransom into a bank account with a number provided by the kidnappers. The kidnappers also offered him a monthly payment plan, with interest, as an alternative. He said he declined, wishing to be done with the situation.
T told the kidnappers that the transaction was complete, and they gave him a drop-off location. But even that was meant to confuse rescuers, he said.
“They call you many times, different people from different numbers, telling you different places,” T said. “ ‘He is at the corner. He is in the street.’ ”
Eventually, T said, his father was dropped in a remote location in Michoacán with duct tape covering his eyes, his nose broken, his ribs broken from beatings, and a lump on his head from being pistol-whipped.
T and his siblings are still gathering the money to repay the loans, and he said he would prefer never to set foot in Mexico again. “Mexico is like a relative that isn’t there,” he said.
He talks with his father two or three times a week, but not about the kidnapping.
“We talk about everything but that topic, I never want to relive it,” he said. “We’ve already paid. It’s someone else’s turn.”
Idalmy Carrera and Kalyn Belsha contributed reporting.
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