LATIN AMERICA : Colombians Hope Bill Will Take Kidnaping Trade Hostage

This troubled nation’s rate of more than five kidnapings a day, the world’s highest, has motivated former victims and the families of those still held hostage to take action.

By obtaining more than 1 million signatures, a private foundation called Free Country has persuaded Colombia’s Congress to introduce legislation raising the maximum sentence for kidnaping to 60 from 25 years, punishing anyone who fails to report an abduction and, most important, freezing the assets of victims’ families to block ransom payments.

Sponsors say the Colombian bill, like the Italian law after which it was modeled, will damage the lucrative kidnaping business by reducing hundreds of millions of dollars in ransom payments each year.

“Kidnaping has become one of the most important industries in Colombia,” said Sen. Andres Pastrana, who was held hostage for a week by drug traffickers in 1988. “It is no longer just affecting the rich but all levels of society, because so many view it as a way to make money fast and with little risk. With this legislation, we are trying to raise the risk and reduce the profits.”

Critics of the bill, which has already passed the Senate and is awaiting almost certain approval by the House, say the law will be difficult to enforce in a country where between 60% and 80% of kidnapings go unreported and where several police officers have been implicated in abductions. In addition, the judicial system here is ill-prepared for the task of freezing and overseeing the assets of thousands of victimized families, the critics say.

“In Colombia, the difficulty is not that we lack laws but that we are unable to enforce the laws we have,” a senior Colombian official said. “This will be just another one to be eluded.”

But even such skeptics agree that Free Country and the Congress have taken the important first step of raising awareness of one of this country’s gravest problems.

The statistics speak for themselves. Last year there were 1,714 reported kidnapings here, up from 721 in 1988. The 1991 figure is more than double the abductions during that year in the rest of the world’s countries put together, according to statistics compiled by Bogota’s El Tiempo newspaper.

And the activity is still growing, according to authorities, whose projections indicate that at least 2,000 people will be abducted this year.

Authorities attribute much of the recent growth in kidnaping to an official crackdown on traffickers in the drug capital, Medellin, sending them underground and forcing them to abandon many of their gangs. Hundreds, if not thousands, of gang members turned to kidnaping, car theft and other crime to make up the lost income.

Even with the increase in abductions by common criminals, authorities say that more than a third of all kidnapings in this country are still carried out by leftist guerrillas. The army estimates that the two active rebel groups, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and the National Liberation Army, earned more than $40 million in ransom payments in 1991.

Many of the victims are ranchers and others with business in regions where the guerrillas are active--people such as Jacinto Gomez, who on New Year’s Day, 1991, was kidnaped in the southern city of Neiva, where he owns a rice processing plant.

When two of his five daughters traveled to nearby Caqueta state a month later to pay the ransom, they too were abducted and carried off into the mountains. Although Gomez was released eight days later, his daughters, Olga Sofia and Natalia, remained in captivity until the following June. Rebels who were beginning another round of fruitless peace talks with the government turned the women over as a sign of good will.

The victims say they would rather die than suffer another abduction.

“When we were being held, we didn’t know if we would be alive or dead the next day,” recalls 23-year-old Natalia, sitting beside her older sister in their father’s spacious Bogota apartment.

Some victims and their families must live with such uncertainty for years. The director of Free Country, Magdelena Pabon, paid a ransom for her blind, 91-year-old father soon after his abduction two years ago. But the kidnapers never returned him, nor did they contact her again.