Naturally someone had to upset my enjoyment of the Christmas shenanigans in beautiful downtown Catemaco. A good friend who had left the so called "war zone" of Oaxaca for the peaceful environs of Laguna Catemaco called desperately wanting to borrow my machine pistol for the next few days.
Apparently he is being victimized by an extorsion phone call demanding the magnificent sum of 15,000 pesos or they'd kill his family. Naturally I rushed my phone recorder, caller ID equipment and a bottle of Johnnie Walker Green Label to his rescue. My gun, unfortunately was glued to my fingers, so I had to call another friend to share his arsenal with this poor under gunned soul.
I've been somewhat following the frequency of phone extorsions in Mexico, so it was no surprise to me that the local police commander calmly stated something like "Oh, yeah, we have reports of 6 of these calls today, with 4 from your colonia (neighborhood)". As an afterthought the corrupt greedy SOB mentioned he would be willing to negotiate a settlement.
After hearing that, I thought to myself that the recent report of 110,000 of these type of calls in Mexico City this year, were probably a Florida undercount.
There are unfortunately no statistics of how many victims actually paid, or whether anyone, anywhere was hurt because of one of these calls.
Nevertheless, it is a frightening experience to receive one of these extorsion calls, and that is why I was so willing to share the local rarity of my green Johnnie Walker, but not my gun.
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