Marin and his family sit on the have-not side of a widening gulf between rich and poor in Mexico. Marin, 34, earned about $36 a week mixing chemicals in a fertilizer factory and sometimes extra cash harvesting sugar cane. His house is a one-room cinder-block structure taken up mostly by two double beds–one for the children, the other for Marin and his 29-year-old wife, Margarita. So when the couple recently bought a new refrigerator and sped up construction of their outhouse, rumors started spreading in their village, Seis de Enero, outside the city of Tepic in western Mexico.
In late November somebody left a note at their gate. “We know that you found the money,” it read. “We want 200,000 pesos [about $22,000]. We are wage earners.” There were vague instructions on where to deliver the cash, adding: “If you don’t we will come and kill you with all your family. You have three days to bring the money.” On the third day, Marin and his family fled. They buried the money–how much is not clear–in the yard. They told Margarita’s sister Yolanda where it was and left to live in hiding. What they couldn’t know then was the real source of the money.
Nearly two months earlier in Guadalajara, Judith Bustamente, 18, was giving a birthday party for a friend. Around 9 p.m., three men with pistols came in through the front door. They ordered everyone to lie face-down on the floor and hand over their cellular phones. The men asked for Judith’s brother, Jesus, but he wasn’t there. They settled for Judith. They taped her mouth shut, led her into a car stolen from one of the guests and drove away.
Judith is the daughter of Jose Bustamente Salcido, a prosperous businessman. Once the mayor of San Luis Rio Colorado, on the Arizona border, he now runs a business importing and exporting agricultural products. He negotiated with the kidnappers by phone for several weeks, finally agreeing to a plan. On Oct. 30, he rented a plane in the Pacific coast city of Mazatlan. Obeying instructions the kidnappers relayed by cell phone, the pilot flew toward Tepic, until he saw the white sheet. The plane circled three times. On the second pass, Bustamente dropped the money. On the third, he followed orders to drop his two cell phones. The pilot and the two antikidnapping police agents on board have told prosecutors that they saw three men running for the satchel. Marin found it first. The next day, the kidnappers called Bustamente to say they never got the money. He negotiated them down to $100,000 for a second ransom payment, set out in a plane again, delivered the money and got his daughter back safely. He assumed that his first ransom payment was gone forever.
But the day after Marin fled, his sister-in-law, Yolanda, showed up at the police station. Her 16-year-old daughter had not come home that night, and she was worried. The police didn’t seem to care, she says, until she showed them the death threat and told them about the money. The police went to Marin’s abandoned house and dug up a plastic bag full of cash. (Yolanda’s daughter, it turns out, spent the night at a friend’s house and returned the next morning.)
The state prosecutor also believed the cash was drug money. He held a press conference saying that his men had recovered $104,000. But when a friend of Bustamente heard the news, he made the connection that it must have been the first ransom payment. Prosecutors handed back the recovered cash. But nearly $80,000 is still missing. Marin, who returned with his family last month, told NEWSWEEK that he had buried all the money. Could the police have stolen part of it? Prosecutors acknowledge that as an outside possibility, though they are dubious. Meanwhile Marin worries about finding work again, and Margarita still picks up cans to sell as scrap. “We’re born poor and that’s how we will die,” she says.
