Folks this is just another reason why I will never go to a Mexican border town ever again:
Five Koreans ? four men and one woman ? had been abducted by several unidentified kidnappers who had disguised themselves as police officers in a U.S.-Mexico border city on July 14, an official of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade said Tuesday.
The official, asking not to be identified, said the abductors have demanded $30,000 in ransom, but declined to give details about the whereabouts of the South Korean nationals and their condition.
“As far as I know, the kidnappers have contacted one of the families of the hostages and asked if they were willing to meet their demands for release,” he said.
“Two of the hostages identified by their family names Park and Lee, respectively, phoned Korean embassy officials stationed in Mexico. However, the remaining three didn’t talk with consular staff.” [Korea Times]
The rest of the Korea Times article tries to link the kidnapping to the Afghan hostage crisis where Seoul ended up paying$10 million to the Taliban to free 21 hostages there. I would seriously doubt these guys in Mexico had any knowledge of the Taliban hostage crisis and more then likely are just your run of the mill kidnappers. Hopefully they don’t read about what the Korean government paid the Taliban because they may just up their asking price.
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9:35 am on July 23rd, 2008 1
Too bad South Korea was never added to the state sponsors of terrorism list.
10:42 am on July 23rd, 2008 2
Things have been pretty out of hand in Mexico over the last few years. Lately, there’s been a spate of articles questioning the stability of the Mexican federal government due to the corruptive influences of the cartels and their increasing infiltration of the Mexican army and police forces.
However, I’d be interested to see how this plays out. I’m sort of disturbed by the fact that I feel this way, but after having lived in Korea for the better part of a decade, I would think there’s a small chance that this is a scam. You know, two adjoshis and and their families decide that they should benefit from the Korean government’s willingness to buy off kidnappers and terrorists.
Having said that, I think the overall situation in Mexico is just an extension of the fact that the US has not had any sort of comprehensive policy in dealing with Latin America for a long time. We’ve seen the cartels in Mexico blossom to the point that nobody knows where they start and the authorities begin. South and Central American governments, one by one, have transferred power over to leftist regimes that are more beholden to Cuba than to the US. The one bright spot seems to be Colombia and their successful campaigns against FARC, yet they are surrounded by hostile countries. I have to wonder if we’re providing anywhere near enough support to Colombia to stem the tide, and we certainly don’t seem to be trying very hard to reverse the current political trends occurring in our own back yard. Who would have thought, more than a decade and a half after the collapse of Communism around the world, Castro ends up looking more like a victor of the Cold War.
10:50 am on July 23rd, 2008 3
The US gave the Korea a warning to not pay the Taliban in Afghanistan in Aug 2007 when they had that payoff fiasco over those volunteers who got kidnapped. At the time, they stated this would have this repeated again and again.
The Koreans were not chosen at random. The reason was the probability that the ransom would be paid by the “rich” Koreans. However, I wonder why the ransom is so low — only $30,000 for five people.
The kidnappers must be very poor or something else is going on.
11:20 am on July 23rd, 2008 4
Yep, it was the “something else is going on.”
http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/national/2008/07/23/99/0302000000AEN20080723002300315F.HTML
Five South Korean hostages held hostage in Mexico have been freed … “It doesn’t seem to have been a case of kidnapping,” the official said, “It appears to have arisen from a power struggle between illegal immigrants.”
Now it may be the “rich” Koreans were illegal immigrants — I wonder if they were the South Korean hooker variety or the North Korean enter-the-US-and-ask-for-asylum variety.
Nice sordid tidbit that the ROK will love to sweep under the table…and the Mexicans too as it highlights their lucrative human trafficking trade. Mexican border town was the location…hah!!!
12:09 pm on July 23rd, 2008 5
One report says that the they were released
http://www.mcall.com/news/nationworld/sns-ap-skorea-mexico-kidnapping,0,7308399.story
1:01 pm on July 23rd, 2008 6
What the heck are Koreans up to in Mexico, anyways?
1:38 pm on July 23rd, 2008 7
For all the Korean bashing going on, there are quite a few Korean Companies that run export businesses out of Reynosa Mexico. Make all the jokes you want, but I know one individual who works in Reynosa and he is quite concerned with crime in general and getting kidnapped. He won’t leave the office after 7PM to go home, he just stays there overnight instead of driving back into the US where his apartment is.
1:40 pm on July 23rd, 2008 8
The last sentence of this Chosun Ilbo report provided an interesting detail:
http://news.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2008/07/23/2008072300125.html
It says that a man surnamed Park had made frequent visits between Mexico and Korea over the last two years and another named Lee had started going last year. The others in the group, including one woman, were not permitted to speak to the reporter. The only attraction of a Mexican border town for those living in Mexico is a gateway to the US. Reynosa is a gateway to McAllen, Texas. I wonder if two of the men were coyotes guiding the others into McAllen, Texas across the border from Reynosa.
2:50 pm on July 23rd, 2008 9
These kidnappers were probably aware of South Korea’s ransom payment to the Taliban.
3:02 pm on July 23rd, 2008 10
“What the heck are Koreans up to in Mexico, anyways?”
Interesting how Koreans talk about America as if its hell on earth and Korea as if it GOD’s garden, yet they beg, borrow and steal their way in to that yankee hell hole.
I know if I was a US border guard and I smelled kimuchi, in a car trunk, I would take the car to the desert and leave it in the hot sun for a week.
3:31 pm on July 23rd, 2008 11
You are probably correct, Surabol.
5:23 pm on July 23rd, 2008 12
So, Shattered, what was her name?
Was she a juicy girl? Or maybe a juicy girl who turned out not to be a girl at all?
Or maybe a yobo who stopped calling you “Yobo” herself, when you could no longer afford her monthly rate?
Who made you so bitter about this place?
6:22 pm on July 23rd, 2008 13
My wife told me that there were hundreds of university students demonstrating at Seoul Station. Does anyone know which group this is? Are they the mad cow people or the Dokdo protestors? Somebody tell me this is not going to be a new staging ground for protests.
7:19 pm on July 23rd, 2008 14
In Seoul, I don’t know what’s going on at Seoul Stattion today, but a main banner on Daum has this ad in which a Korean politican is using the candlegirl logo as a key visual feature of his campaign:
http://www.joupia.net/gnuboard4/0730HTML/main.html
Shameless! These people are going to milk this thing for all it’s worth. Does it not bother him at all that the candlegirls’ fears were all proven to be based on lies? Apparently not!
1:46 am on July 24th, 2008 15
“Who made you so bitter about this place?”
I am just tough on kimuchi crime.
2:25 am on July 24th, 2008 16
Reynoso, and its U.S. sister city McAllen, are home to a fair number of US and foreign owned factories. Korean companies can be found in Mexico as well as Honduras, Panama, and may other Central American countries. In 1995-95, there was an 8,000 (+-) Korean community living in Mexico City, most involved in the textile business. That sounds like a lot, but within a city of 24 million, they were invisible unless you just happened to know where their neighborhood was. Korean interest in Latin America was evident in the 1970s, when Korean trade shows were annual affairs in many capital cities. The Koreans would come in, survey the local manufacturing scene and goods markets, and show up a year or so later with a selection of cheaper goods tuned to the market. To take the Caribbean “guayabera” shirt as an example, the most expensive guayaberas (made in Mexico) were out of reach of the poor, who had a hard time buying more than one locally made guayabera. By 1977, Korean made guayabera shirts could be found from Panama to Honduras, all affordably priced. The same was true for metal ware, kitchen ware, and a host of other products. It was only a matter of time before Korean companies moved some of their operations into the region. As for kidnapping, It was already a business in Mexico City by the mid-90’s. My neighbor, a factory manager from Colombia, was grabbed one night and held for a week by a gang he suspected were police. Another neighbor, a Guatemalan who represented a U.S. cracker and cookie company, was held for several days by what turned out to be disgruntled former employees. The bottom line is that kidnapping is a real threat to any foreigner residing and doing business in Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Ecuador, Honduras, or Bolivia. And many of those countries have resident Korean (and Taiwanese, Japanese, etc) business communities running factories or selling their nation’s products to the locals.
Latin America: It’s not just for Gringos anymore.
4:48 am on July 25th, 2008 17
The Korean media is now reporting that three of the five were Korean-Chinese using fake South Korean passports and the other two were probably smugglers.