When I Was Kidnapped

I heard Ioan Grillo on Joe Rogan talking about horrible brushes with criminal Mexico. He spoke well on the subject, his experiences with the gangs in Michoacan. A death threat if he didn’t proved who he was. He pulled out his website, showed he was a journalist, and they let him go.

He spoke with such clarity and matter-of-factness on the subject, like the best journalists always do, that it turned my thoughts to an event in my own past, that I had tried very hard to blot out, and what I considered to be a kidnapping.

It was 2016, and I was 27-years-old. In the zocalo (main square) of Oaxaca City I came across a group of indigenous people whose womenfolk dressed in very colourful clothing. After speaking to them, I understood that they were Triqui Indigenous, from a region of the Pacific coastal mountain range, where the states of Oaxaca and Guerrero meet.

There were around 100 of these people in their group, and they had installed themselves under the arches of the municipal palace, effectively blocking entry. They spent their days here selling merchandise; kitchen implements, traditional clothing, and tourist souvenirs, and their nights sleeping in place.

Thinking there could be a story here, I asked if there was a spokesman. He told me that he and his people had been chased away by their own people. It seems that some very heavy duty weapons had made their way into the mountains, and that there had been infighting between different groups. What was going on behind these facts, whether there was drug cultivation (the most likely scenario), there was no way to tell. Braulio, the spokesman, was tight-lipped.

I took his details and some video testimony, and thought little more of it. I was on a reporting trip, and in a week’s time, I would be two hour’s drive from the location. 

A week later, after outlining the project to my shooter and him being happy to follow my lead, we drove in my black Jeep Liberty, up dirt roads to the town of San Juan Copala. 

The drive was pleasant, we came through the first Triqui settlement, and stopped to take some pictures and chat with the local people. We saw a lot of women in the very colourful red huipil (the Oaxacan indigenous clothing for women), but few men.

At the next town, where a stunning view was at the curve in a steep river valley, we stopped for a coffee. We were served politely, drank our drinks, and went back to the car. The next town up was half an hour away, and it was Copala, the municipal seat. Yet as we left the café and returned to the car, and old man, big white moustache and cowboy hat, perhaps 60 years old. Think of the narrator in The Big Lebowski. He was strolling across the main plaza with a large shotgun held in both hands. I asked my cameraman to take a picture, and we rolled onwards.

As we rounded the bend to get into Copala, the single road at the entrance to the town was blocked by a large black SUV. Beside it stood the man I assumed to be the town mayor. Perhaps 50. Thin and strong. We stopped the car in front of his and he approach the window.

“Who are you and what are you doing here?” he growled.

“I’m sorry”, I said and put the Jeep into reverse. 

“Stop where you are.” He demanded. 

I did a three-point turn and sped off back the way I had come. In my rearview mirror, I saw him waving his finger at me and reaching for his radio.

We raced back. Speeding along these terrible roads as fast as we could.

“Switch out the SD card for the pictures”, I called to the shooter. He did so and began snapping forest scenes for filler as the greenery raced by the window.

As we entered the next town, a single sedan car had been parked along the road, and four men surrounded it. None of them stood directly in my way so I swerved around them. As I drove past I caught a flash of the grinning face of one of the men. 

“Fuck!” I shouted at myself. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

As we entered the next town, the final town before the road down to the coast, two cars has now blocked the road completely. On one side was bush, on the other, the steep hillside down to the river. I was forced to stop. Ten men surrounded the car. They were heavily armed. Tactical assault rifles, body armour. Half of them were dressed in suits which at first glace appeared to be Federal Police uniforms, but which on closer inspection were imitations (wonky sewn on flag patches, badly printed lettering).

“Get out of the car and hand the keys to me”, shouted the oldest among them, a tall dark man, around 35-years-old, said to me. I did what he instructed.

“Stand here and do not move.” Both the photographer and I stood in front of the car.

And there we stood for five minutes, which was the time it took for the black SUV with the Copala boss in it, to arrive.

He stepped down from the truck and stood in front of me.

“I’ll ask you again güero, who are you and what are you doing here?”

“We’re international journalists,” I said. “We came here looking to do a cultural story on the Triqui people.”

“I think you’re from the Mexican government,” he replied.

“I’m not. I’m British. My friend here is Australian.”

“I think you’re from the Mexican military,” he said, and signalled to the men around me. “Take these men to the café.”

Thus we were accompanied to the room we had been drinking coffee not one hour before. We sat at the same table, four of us, we and our two guards, for an hour. Elsewhere, the men had disappeared, with our cameras and memory cards (all of them).

Another hour went by in total silence. I spent most of the time looking out of the windows. Watching bees do their work on flowers was a slight distraction from the horror of what I had gotten myself into.

Eventually, the local officials reappeared and summoned us outside. The boss signalled to one of the cars that had blocked the road, where a driver and passenger were now sitting.

“Get in.”

I looked around and there was no sign of my Jeep. I had no choice. Running for it through this jungle looked very difficult, and being shot in the back as I attempted it by any of ten of these men would be awful. I was cornered.

I walked over to the car. The four of us sat in the backseat, our guards with their shotguns between their legs, the outer pair. We began driving down the hill.

I was numb. I was certain this was going to be the end of my life. “You fucking idiot Alasdair,” I could hear my father in my head. His intonation, his voice. “You complete fucking twat. How have you gotten yourself, and another man, into a situation like this?”

This was it. They are going to drive down a path only known to those who live in these mountains, stop in a convenient place, and I’m going to be shot. “You fucking twat!” 

Yet the car kept moving, and we didn’t turn off the highway. I closed my eyes and tried to clear my mind. The car kept moving, and eventually we arrived in the town at the foot of the mountain, where the federal highway meets the road that enters Triqui country, and into what looked like a military outpost.

A large green and red flag, with the words MULT emblazoned across was hung behind a commandant’s desk. We were taken to the cells, and cast separately into adjoining units.

I later learned that MULT stood for Triqui Fight and Unification Movement

“I’m sorry mate, this is my fault.” I said to the photographer. He was as numb as me. “It’s ok. We’ll get out of this.”

After another hour we were summoned to the commandant. He was a short strapping man, perhaps 35 years old.

We went through the same questions. “I’m a journalist.”

“Prove it.”

I handed over my business card, and asking permission to use my cellphone, pulled up my personal website which contains my work. After half an hour of questioning, the commandant was contented.

“Ok, let’s have a picture.”

We had our mugshots taken, and then he asked us for a photo of the three of us. I don’t have a copy of it, but I probably wouldn’t want one.

“We’re going to see the federal attorney’s office.”

We were driven to the local official, an old man sat behind a desk in a rundown old building with PGR (Procuraduría General de la Republica, or legal processing center). I sat there while the MULT official told the story. We had driven up into the mountains and had been escorted back down. End of story. I signed on the line, you boys certainly won’t hear or see from me ever again.

We returned to the outpost where my Jeep had appeared, with all of our gear in it.

“Time to go.” It was 8 o’clock in the evening. The sun was setting. We got into the Jeep, and after as many handshakes as we thought necessary, drove the nine hours straight back to Mexico City. Arriving at 5am, I slept for a long time.

For a week afterwards, I felt numb. Emotionless. Having been so convinced I was about to die I think my mind had gone into a painkiller mode. There’s no other way I can really describe the feeling.

After a week, I spoke with my Dad, and told him in about the same detail as the federal authorities had been given. Broad strokes.

“Are you feeling ok about it now then?”, he asked. “Yes, no problem.”

I told almost nobody about the experience. A close journalist friend, and kept it under wraps. I tried to block it out, not to think about it, and succeeded. For five years, I hadn’t ever thought about it for more than a moment. Mexicans like to ask foreign journalists what the worst thing that has ever happened to them in their country has been. I always say, “some bad stuff, I prefer not to talk about it.”

However after thinking about it again having listen to Ioan Grillo, I find myself thinking about it more. When I look back, it was a horrible experience, and I think my biggest mistake was fleeing when I was first stopped. If I had simply explained who I was and what I was doing there, things might have turned out differently. I made myself suspicious, and that not a good idea around heavily-armed vigilantes.

I’ve written this as a sort of closure. It happened to me, but I’m wiser as a result, and it’s an experience I hope never to forget again.

Unwiling to come out of the act a complete loser, I wrote a piece for the Daily Mail on the situation in the mountains (although declined to write up anything about my own experience), and that’s where these pictures come from.