Bellwether or Battleground?

Carmen Genis’ business is booming--for all the wrong reasons.

The feisty, 40-year-old travel agent is setting sales records as her tiny storefront agency here sells hundreds of cut-rate air tickets each week to peasants fleeing this deeply troubled state of Morelos. Most are headed for Tijuana and then, they said, points north--illegal journeys across California’s southern border.

Carmen Genis’ nonprofit business also is thriving these days: In her spare time, she runs a private foundation for kidnap victims, whose ranks have grown exponentially amid a wave of lawlessness and corruption that has swept Morelos in the past 18 months.

At a time when kidnappers here are targeting--and sometimes killing--everyone, from farmers who employ hundreds of workers to market vendors, many here are getting out.

It is against this anarchic backdrop that Mexico opens its crucial year of midterm elections today. Voters will select 33 new mayors and a new legislature in Morelos, a small but politically important central state that abuts the nation’s capital.

The Morelos polls are the first in a series of state and national elections that analysts expect will change Mexico’s political landscape as the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, struggles to stay in power.

“Morelos is a test of what is coming,” said Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, an independent, firebrand federal legislator from the state. “It will be an uphill battle for the PRI.”

Evidence of the anti-PRI sentiment--and the lawlessness--in the state came Friday when the candidate for mayor of the state capital, Cuernavaca, was attacked at a campaign appearance by a protester who hit her in the face with a bottle.

More than just a bellwether of the key elections to come--July 6 polls for the nation’s lower House of Deputies and Mexico City’s mayor--the Morelos vote has framed one of the most critical issues nationwide: crime, corruption and an atmosphere of insecurity.

In Cuautla, as in dozens of other Morelos towns and villages and even Cuernavaca, those issues have coalesced in a scourge of kidnappings--165 cases throughout the state in the last year, according to unofficial tallies. State officials put the number at 149.

Kidnapping for profit has increased nationwide, along with other major crimes, after two years of economic crisis. But Genis and local human rights activists say the problem is especially acute in Morelos because of its geography, endemic police corruption and general atmosphere of lawlessness.

Morelos has easy access to remote mountain regions in three neighboring states where kidnappers can harbor their victims beyond the reach of the law until ransoms are paid. Federal authorities say the state also has been a haven for major drug traffickers; last week, agents raided a ranch near Cuernavaca in an unsuccessful attempt to capture Amado Carrillo Fuentes, Mexico’s reputed top drug lord.

The state’s independent human rights commission, which sent an “urgent” appeal to the nation’s attorney general for help last month, attributed Morelos’ kidnapping rates--the highest in the nation--to “the impunity and corruption prevailing in Morelos.”

In his nine-page letter, commission President Jose Ortiz Martinez outlined several cases in which state police were responsible for local kidnappings that also were linked to drug traffickers. He concluded, “In this atmosphere of uncertainty, the working class is afraid to plan for its future.”

Jorge Aragon Cattar’s family is among the most recent victims. The Jan. 28 abduction of the farmer in the Morelos village of Tepalcingo starkly illustrates the crime wave’s impact on illegal migration from a state that border watchers say is not a traditional source of undocumented migrants.

Aragon was snatched by several armed men with suspected ties to the state police just outside his onion farm. He was kidnapped along with his U.S. business partner, Domingo Ramirez Cavazos. Both men were forced to lie face down in a pickup truck, driven 1 1/2 hours on paved and dirt roads and a final two hours on horseback to another state.

The original ransom demands, delivered in a cellular phone call within hours of the kidnapping, were $500,000 for Ramirez and $320,000 for Aragon. Their families negotiated, and the kidnappers agreed to a sum of $50,000 for Ramirez and $20,000 and jewelry for Aragon.

As instructed, they left two bags with the money on a roadside near Tepalcingo and waited. Ramirez appeared hours later. Aragon did not and still hasn’t; his family is convinced that he is dead.

Agustin Aragon Sosa, a Cuernavaca attorney who is the victim’s cousin, said Aragon was a diabetic who needed two insulin doses a day. Before his release, Ramirez watched his partner slip into a diabetic coma several times.

“We’re sure Jorge is already dead,” Agustin Aragon said. “What this shows is that there is no security here. There is no government. There is no one to stop what’s happening here.”

Ramirez fled Morelos after his release, and the vast La Corredora onion fields--among the state’s largest--have shut down. Nearly 200 local workers suddenly were unemployed. Within days, they started showing up, along with hundreds of other unemployed or frightened peasants, at Carmen Genis’ travel agency to buy cheap air tickets.

“They’re all going to Tijuana, and then across [the U.S. border],” Genis said as a steady stream of peasants pulled crumpled pesos out of their boots and socks to pay the $150 fare on Aerolineas Internacionales, a private Mexican airline.

“If they have the money, they prefer to fly because the bus ride is very long and very hot. They don’t want to arrive with their tongues hanging out because they need energy to run across the border. When they fly, they can cross the same night.”

For Genis, honored recently as the airline’s top ticket seller, her profit seemed dwarfed by the insecurity driving the travel boom. Alarmed by a neighbor’s abduction when kidnap-for-profit gangs began to proliferate in 1995, Genis formed Citizens House, a nongovernmental agency to help kidnap victims and their families. Since then, she said, there have been 250 abductions in Morelos--90 in Cuautla alone--with total ransoms of $4 million paid by victims’ families.

Many of those kidnappings, she and opposition leaders in the state said, are linked to drug trafficking and, more alarmingly, to corruption in the state police institutions that are charged with preventing them. State prosecutors say many of the kidnappers who have been apprehended also are involved in the drug trade. In several cases, the kidnappers were found to be current or former state police.

“There is a very intimate relationship between the kidnappers and the state police,” said Graco Ramirez Garrido, an opposition federal lawmaker from Morelos.

Another incident, the unsolved case of Francisco Gerardo Resendiz, showed how high that corruption reaches in the police ranks. Resendiz, the 19-year-old son of a local businessman, was kidnapped nearly two years ago and, despite two paid ransoms, still has not been released.

One of those ransoms--$30,000 in cash--ended up in the hands of Javier Rueda Flores, who was the commander of the state’s anti-kidnapping unit at the time. After his arrest on corruption charges, Rueda told investigators that he stole the ransom from the kidnappers. But Genis, the victim’s father and other local human rights groups insist, based on the kidnappers’ telephone calls and the role Rueda played in the investigation, that Rueda was a part of the kidnapping plot from the beginning.

“There is not a single kidnapping in which the police do not participate,” Genis charged.

During the past year, she said, at least 28 businesses in Cuautla alone have closed their doors, and their owners have fled because of the region’s insecurity.

The political impact of that lawlessness on today’s elections remains to be seen, she said. Throughout the campaign, however, Genis’ Citizens House and other human rights organizations have gone to great lengths to make it a central issue.

Bedecked with gold jewelry and wearing a T-shirt sporting a drawing of Mexican revolutionary Emilio Zapata, Genis led hundreds of protesters who confronted President Ernesto Zedillo during one of his two preelection visits to the state.

“Sir, listen to us: There is so much corruption, insecurity and impunity here,” Genis shouted, flanked by victims’ relatives, within an arm’s reach of the president during a heated Feb. 20 protest.

The incident infuriated the state’s ruling party governor, Jorge Carrillo Olea, who toured the state at the president’s side. But within days, state officials stenciled on walls throughout Morelos the number of kidnappers arrested during the past year, and new PRI campaign billboards were erected promising “real solutions” to crime and corruption.

Genis, who sent her two children to Miami last September after receiving numerous threats, went from protest to political activism. She and her Citizens House members joined the populist Democratic Revolutionary Party, or PRD. They have campaigned heavily for the party’s candidates throughout the state.

In a three-way race among the PRI, the PRD and the largest opposition group, the conservative National Action Party, or PAN, Genis said, she and her supporters are convinced that only the PRD will crack down on kidnapping at what she called its source: official corruption in the state’s ruling party government.

“What I really hope is that the PRI loses,” she said. “Who are the authorities responsible for all this? They’re PRI-istas. They’ve had us by the ears too long. It’s time we threw them out.”

Despite the widespread allegations that police are behind many of the kidnappings, ruling party officials in Morelos--some of whom are kidnap victims themselves--flatly disagreed.

“Of course, the insecurity worries us, but the authorities are not involved,” asserted Andres Gonzales, the PRI president in Cuautla.

Gonzales explained that his wife’s cousin was kidnapped six months ago and that the family paid a ransom of $22,000 to free him. At no point were authorities implicated in the crime, he said.

The state’s top prosecutor, Atty. Gen. Carlos Peredo Merlo, confirmed that kidnappings soared in Morelos last year to 149--a 46% jump over 1995, when there was a 34% increase over 1994. Although he said that those figures are down for the first quarter of this year, showing only two kidnappings, he conceded that most kidnappings are not reported. Genis said her group has counted 11.

Agustin Aragon, cousin of the kidnap victim, explained why he believes that just 20% of all such crimes are reported to authorities.

“No one trusts them,” he said. “Why report a crime to criminals?”