Via the NYT: Haiti’s New Scourge: Kidnappings That Frighten the Rich and Poor
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, June 5 – She is a bank teller. Her husband delivers air mail packages for DHL.In a country where about 70 percent of adults have no jobs, that means Gehanne and Jacques-Henri Beaulieu are worth a small fortune.
On Tuesday, it was 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,” a voice said, at once gentle and cold, “we will execute her.”
Emptying his bank accounts, Mr. Beaulieu came up with only $2,700. He began calling friends and relatives, many in the United States, asking desperately for money.
“I asked everybody I knew, ‘Please help me get my wife back,’ ” he said less than two hours after the kidnapping, still in the heat of panic, after friends of his family helped a reporter contact him. “If I get her back, I am going to send her away from here.”
“This country is out of control,” he said. “No one is safe.”
Utterly insane.
