PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti She's a bank teller. Her husband delivers for DHL, the package service. In a country where more than 80 percent of all live in desperate poverty, that means Gehanne and Jacques-Henri Beaulieu are worth a small fortune.
The other day, it got taken.
As Mrs. Beaulieu arrived for work on Tuesday, in broad daylight, on the busy Rue des Miracles, three men carrying long guns forced their way into her car. Within the hour, they called her husband by cellphone and demanded $20,000.
"If you do not give us the money," said a voice, "we will execute her."
Emptying his bank accounts, Mr. Beaulieu came up with only $2,700.
"I asked everybody I knew, 'Please help me get my wife back,"' he said less than two hours after the kidnapping, after friends of his family helped a reporter reach him. "If I get her back, I am going to send her away from here. This country is out of control. No one is safe."
More than a year after the start of yet another conflict-ridden political transition, it is hard to tell who, if anyone, has taken charge in Haiti.
After an armed rebellion, months of violent political clashes in the capital, and heavy pressure by the United States forced President Jean-Bertrand Aristide from office in February 2004, the world pledged $1.4 billion in aid and the United Nations sent more than 8,000 peacekeepers to help a shaky interim government bring order.
But chaos still reigns. Even supporters of the interim leaders have accused them as too weak to instill confidence and negotiate peace among this country's disparate political factions.
By the accounts of diplomats and political observers, human rights activists and business people, this remains a country poised for implosion. Almost all its institutions have been ravaged by corruption. Rising in the void are an abundance of organized criminals, including drug traffickers, former military officers, dirty police officers and street gangs who have set off a devastating wave of murders, carjackings, armed robberies and rapes.
Kidnappings are the latest scourge.
Reliable statistics are hard to find, because kidnappings, like most crimes, go unreported. But the authorities of the interim government and foreign diplomats estimate that 6 to 12 kidnappings occur in this city every day. Among them are high-profile cases, like the recent abductions of an Indian businessman and a Russian contractor to the United Nations. Some authorities said they had received reports of vegetable vendors being kidnapped for $30.
The overwhelming majority of the cases seem aimed at the middle and working classes. Afraid to go to the police, most families negotiate with the kidnappers on their own. Mostly, authorities said, they work out a deal.
So ended Mrs. Beaulieu's ordeal.
About 4 p.m. on Tuesday, her relatives told the kidnappers they had collected $4,000, and the kidnappers said they would accept it.
When a relative took the money to the rendezvous, he said, four men shined flashlights in his eyes. One shoved a gun into his stomach, while another grabbed the bag from his hands and began counting the money.
Then the head of the kidnappers emerged from a back room, looked the relative in the eye, thanked him for the money and told the trembling man that Mrs. Beaulieu would be released within a few hours.
He kept his word.
A sobbing Mrs. Beaulieu was released about 8:30 p.m. at a street corner and the kidnappers called her relatives and told them where they could pick her up[SIGN][/SIGN]
06-07-05, 05:44 PM
USA en retard!!!!!!!!!!! 
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