Abduction of U.S. Security Expert Demonstrates Brazenness of Criminals in Mexico

They ordered the goat. That’s what the kitchen is famous for at the upscale La Principal restaurant in Saltillo, a prosperous manufacturing city in the high desert of northern Mexico. And so it was only natural that Felix Batista, an American expert in corporate security, and his new friends decided to get it. But Batista never finished his meal.

Instead, after a series of quick cellphone calls and whispered conversations, Batista excused himself from the table. On his way out, he gave the well-heeled businessmen he was meeting with his laptop, shoulder bag and a contact.

“If I’m not back,” he told his companions, according to one of them, “call these numbers.”

The 55-year-old Miami resident, who has successfully negotiated the release of hundreds of kidnapping victims in Latin America, then willingly got into an SUV that had pulled to the curb, according to investigators who have a security camera image capturing that moment on the evening of Dec. 10.

Batista has not been heard from since.

His is probably the highest-profile kidnapping of a U.S. citizen in Mexico in years, and it has sent tremors through the executive class of expats in Saltillo, known as “the Detroit of Mexico” for its Chrysler and General Motors assembly plants. A fellow security consultant described the abduction as “highly professional, sophisticated, very slick. The work of people who did not fear being caught, which is the most disturbing element.”

Source – Washingtonpost.com.