SASKIA’s STORY
The story she tells me is as amazing as it is tragic.
Saskia and her son Stefan are living with an extended family of hippies in little fishing village approximately 150 kilometers West near Puerto Escondido on Oaxaca’s Pacific coast. The night before the kidnapping, a young French Canadian couple arrives at the village with two children. The boy is about three and the girl four, maybe five. There is something about the man that makes the group uneasy. He is sullen and uncommunicative as if he is traveling with a dark destructive secret. He is.
Saskia describes the man as having “real bad vibes.” But because it is late in the day, the group decides to allow the couple and their children to spend the night sleeping near the compound and move on after that.
The next morning Saskia wakes early to find that Stefan is missing from his hammock a few feet away on the verandah. “My God,” she thinks. What if Stefan has wandered down to the beach and into the water? Then she notices that all his blankets and clothes are also missing. Her mind immediately jumps to the strange couple who arrived the night before.
Saskia races through the compound looking for Stefan and the visitors. They are nowhere to be found. Finally she goes into the village and talks with some of the fishermen. One of them has seen a couple with three children catch a ride on the back of a truck carrying the night’s catch of fish up to the market in Oaxaca. He remembers one child in particular because while the rest of them had dark hair, the child the man was carrying had blond hair and was crying. Like Saskia, Stefan has blond hair.
Saskia thinks fast. The man just said the truck only left a half an hour ago. This means she can catch up to them in another vehicle. But what other vehicle? Running like the wind across the dusty rutted roads in her bare feet, Saskia heads for the house of the local Catholic priest. An Irish-American who speaks Spanish like a Mexican, the priest can only offer his battered old bicycle. He leads Saskia to the modest house of the local policeman.
The policeman is not pleased with this early morning visit. Especially since it might mean some work. But bowing to the arguments of the insistent priest he agrees to give chase. Ten miles up the road his right rear tire blows. He doesn’t have a spare and even if he had, he has no jack. With no traffic on the road they have to walk back to the village.
Upon their return, Saskia and the Priest beg the policeman to use his phone to call the next station up the road. He refuses. Using every argument they can think of, they plead with him to call Oaxaca. Again he refuses. Why? Because he doesn’t want anyone else to know that he’s had a flat with no spare and no jack. And not because anyone would be angry with him. But because they would laugh.
Eventually, Saskia finds someone who gives her a ride to Oaxaca. But by then it is too late and the local police just sit at their desks, shaking their heads sympathetically as the near hysterical American woman demands action in a language they don’t understand.
It is another day before Saskia can return with the priest who patiently explains in Spanish and gives the police a description they can distribute to other stations.
Unfortunately, once the fugitives reached Oaxaca, they could have gone in any direction from there. Saskia needs the help of the Federal Police and that means a long journey to Mexico City by bus.
Saskia’s finances are limited. But with a little help from her friends, she manages to buy a round trip bus ticket and stays with some hippie friends near the city. Once there, she visits the US embassy and speaks to officials who promise to help her in any way they can. Big deal.
Then she goes to the impressive offices of the Federal Police and after a day of run-arounds, is assigned to not so young police Captain. Saskia pauses as she tells me this part of the story and looks out towards the street. Tears well up in her eyes and she turns to me and says, “The fucking bastard .… he raped me!”
The Captain might have been an officer but certainly no gentleman. After forcing Saskia to have sex with him, the policeman pulls his pants back up and warns Saskia that he’ll see to it that she never see her child again if she ever tells anyone about what happened. The next day he rapes her again. A fucking bastard indeed.
In practical terms it is a wasted trip. And as far as Saskia can find out, absolutely nothing concrete had been done by either the US or Mexican authorities to track down Stefan and his kidnappers.
By the time she approaches me on the street in Oaxaca, her son had been missing three weeks.
| Kidnap in Oaxaca © Robert R. Feigel 2022 – All rights reserved |
Pieces from a Puzzling Life 