Hostages of extortion in Mexico
EL PAÍS takes a look at this crime, one of the most common in the country and one that gets rarely reported
Hostages of extortion in Mexico
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A man and a woman showed up late at night, and exchanged looks. The neon sign at the taco stand glowed “open” in red letters, like an old neighborhood movie marquee. On the side of the stainless steel cart, an electronic panel flashed the words: “Ruben’s Tacos, kickass taquería.”
The pair — both in their early thirties — stood out in the darkness of the Escandón neighborhood, in downtown Mexico City. The man was nearly 6’5 feet tall; while the woman had blond hair and surgically perfect curves that — weeks later, after dying her hair black to conceal her trail — would give her away to the police.
They ate in silence, but with an attitude that made the son of Rubén Orozco — the man who named the taco stand — say to his father: “They are kind of clowns.” Orozco, who had been away from the stand for a few minutes, noticed the couple for the first time. He became uneasy.
—I turn to look at the young man, and he’s scanning me. He gives me a very strange look.
He remembers the experience in detail because that day was his wife’s birthday. He was in a good mood, January was ending, things were going well, it was a night of celebration. He looked the man in the eye and asked:
—What can I help you with? What do you need?
The man looked away. When the couple finished eating, the man went over to pay. They said they were new to the neighborhood and wanted to throw a welcome party at a good taco stand. Could he give them his phone number so they could contact him? Orozco resisted at first, making polite excuses, but finally gave in when they insisted. Then he went home and left his son to finish up cleaning. The stand usually closes around midnight, but after that, there’s still some cleaning to do. An hour later, his phone rang.
—Don Rubén, what’s going on? How are you?
—I’m fine, how can I help?
—Well, I just sent my people.
—What people? What’s this about?
—Don’t act like you don’t know what it’s about. How much is your family’s peace of mind worth?
At 59, Orozco has the build of a boxer. He’s a tall and powerful man, who teaches karate in the neighborhood, and is also skilled in Haidong Gumdo, the Korean sword art. Added to this are the decades of work in the taco stand, his skill with a butcher knife, and a right hand like a meat sledgehammer. His mind disciplined by kata, his character tempered by work: at first, he wasn’t worried, but the voice on the other end of the line got into his head.
—Will you cooperate or should I swing by for your son, who’s still cleaning?
The phone call lasted 40 minutes, and by the end, Orozco had agreed to pay 20,000 pesos, about $1,050. The extortionists knew that the entire family worked at Ruben’s Tacos, that they accepted credit cards, and that the number of customers had skyrocketed after their appearance on the Netflix series Taco Chronicles. Orozco agreed to send them two cardless withdrawals. With this method, anyone with a reference number can withdraw money from someone’s account at any ATM. During the call, Orozco sent a withdrawal of 9,000 pesos ($470) and agreed to pay the rest the next day.
In the morning, Orozco got up at 6 a.m. and went to the Merced market to stock up on supplies for the taco stand. By 2:00 p.m., he had already sent the remaining money. He thought the worst was over. But at 8:30 p.m., the phone rang again:
—The boss says it’s not enough, that after 20 years it can’t be that you don’t have any savings.
They were small-time crooks, but Orozco didn’t know that at the time. He was told they belonged to La Unión Tepito, a cartel with a lot of power in Mexico City, with a particularly strong presence in the northern part of the city center. Orozco was told that if he didn’t have money in the bank, he should borrow some from a friend, sell his car, or use his imagination.
Frightened, the family packed four T-shirts into a suitcase, picked up their SUV, which was parked in the public lot across from Ruben’s Tacos, hired a moving company to take the taco stand, and fled. On their way out, they went to the Prosecutor’s Office to file a complaint. Five hours later, on a cold January morning, the family left Mexico City.
Balderas is both a street and a scar — an avenue where several neighborhoods of downtown Mexico City converge: the parks of Alameda and Ciudadela, new sidewalks, small trees, bus stops, shiny shops, and abandoned spaces. Balderas is also a space to sell things. That’s what Antonio García was told in March. Antonio García is a made-up name used to protect his real identity for safety reasons. García is older, and his life hasn’t been easy. Looking for some income, one day in February he arrived at Balderas, in front of an empty storefront, and set up his tarp on the sidewalk. He sold old tools, padlocks, and all kinds of small trinkets. It was enough to get by. But in March, he reported that three men came to intimidate him. One of them said he was “the coordinator of the whole street.” He added that if García wanted to sell there, he had to pay them 50 pesos a day. They said that if he didn’t, he should “get out right away.” García packed up his stuff and left while the others watched. What he made from selling items on the street couldn’t cover such a payment. Even though he reported them, he preferred to find another place. “I haven’t gone back to sell out of fear that they might do something to me if I don’t pay what they ask,” he says.
Seven million victims
In police jargon, what the Orozco family suffered is called direct or physical extortion: when there is direct contact with the criminal. The phone call completed the earlier visit by the two thirtysomethings to the taco stand, where they only needed to get his cellphone number to hook him — the perfect trap.
Orozco did something almost no one does: he reported it immediately. He acted out of habit, not expecting any progress. That very night, he and his wife moved to a town 60 kilometers from the capital. Orozco’s son, sheltered with his sister at her boyfriend’s house, posted a message on the taco stand’s Instagram account, thanking long-time customers, saying goodbye, and blaming their departure, without further details, on extortion.
That message on social media went viral. So much so that Mauricio Tabe, mayor of Miguel Hidalgo — the district umbrella for the Escandón neighborhood — and a regular customer of the Orozco family, asked how he could help. Orozco knew the official from his visits to the taco stand but had never thought to ask him for help. Tabe directed them to the Directorate for Attention to Kidnapping and Extortion Cases of the Mexico City police. Once there, the investigation began to move forward. It was mid-February.
As part of the wave of violence gripping Mexico, extortion has become, by necessity, one of the government’s priorities. According to Mexico’s National Statistics Institute’s annual survey on victimization and security perception in the country, it is the third most common crime experienced by the population. In 2023, the most recent year studied, 5,213 Mexicans per 100,000 reported being victims of extortion — in other words, nearly seven million citizens per year, more than 18,000 daily, 780 every hour, 13 every minute.
Cobro de piso (protection money), support payments to unelected commercial leaders, incentives to authorities… These are different ways of naming extortion, which in Mexico has become an epidemic. Criminals demand payments from tortilla, chicken, or egg vendors. They extort merchants for setting up stalls in street markets, opening businesses in high, middle, or low-value areas, or producing tequila and mezcal. Police officers ask drivers for “cooperation” to continue on their way... They demand payments from banana producers, from people with family in the United States who receive remittances, from construction workers and migrants. From everyone.
Part of the problem is the number of cases reported — virtually none. According to the survey mentioned above, 96.7% of extortion victims do not report the crimes, likely out of fear of reprisals. This is not an unusual figure given the situation in Mexico. According to estimates from various organizations monitoring the justice system, impunity rates in the country exceed 90%. That is, nine out of 10 crimes are never solved.
In Mexico City, the Secretariat of Citizen Security created a special anti-extortion unit seven years ago. Police Chief Pablo Vázquez has repeatedly stated that a certain “institutional maturity” is needed to address the problem. If all goes well, reports will increase, and that will be the case for some time. The department reports that last year they handled 2,288 cases, the vast majority — 2,099 — being extortion via phone calls. This year, as of April, there had already been 519 in total. One of the unit’s commanders, interviewed several times in recent months, says that this is the way forward. “You have to report it,” he concludes.
Before reaching the Torre del Caballito statue, Guerrero Street winds through working-class neighborhoods. On one side, the Guerrero neighborhood; on the other, Buenavista — favorite spots of writer Roberto Bolaño. At the beginning of the year, Joaquín Del Mazo— a pseudonym — rented a space to open a food business. He was working on renovations, fixing up the façade, when one day, suddenly, three people showed up claiming to be Cuauhtémoc municipal employees. They told him that because he was doing construction work and had left the rubble lying around, he was going to be fined 25,000 pesos ($13,000). Del Mazo told them he only had 2,000 pesos, and the others, led by someone named Adán Valdez Serrano, said: "Honestly, give me 5,000 pesos [$260] — I already told the others to leave and to stop the fine." In other words, if he paid them 5,000 pesos, the supposed fine would disappear. Between him and his wife, Del Mazo scraped together 3,500 pesos ($180), which they gave to Valdez. The supposed official took the money and left them a few cellphone numbers — just in case anything came up.
Leaders and mafias
The April afternoon sun bakes the awnings covering the streets of República de Argentina, Perú, and Bolivia, the border between Mexico City’s touristy historic center and the rough neighborhood of Tepito. The streets are packed with vendors. Radios blast cumbias under the thick heat. Hundreds of people jostle as products are loaded and unloaded.
Diana Sánchez Barrios, local representative, trans activist, and business leader, moves up Argentina street, dodging bodies. She is surrounded by a police escort and a retinue of supporters.
The color of the awnings maps the power structure in the downtown area. On these streets, the red ones belong to Sánchez Barrios’ organization; the blue ones to another leader. Just in Cuauhtémoc, the most central borough of Mexico City, around 100 vendor leaders divide up the territory with mathematical precision, according to Sánchez Barrios — who, just a few months ago, survived a shooting attack in the center by sheer miracle.
Vendors pay dues to their leaders in exchange for protection from the authorities and from other leaders — a situation so normalized that no one calls it what it really is: another form of extortion. Street vending is an extremely lucrative pie with many slices to go around. Sánchez Barrios estimates — and figures from Mexico’s Center for Economic Research and Teaching (CIDE) back her up — that there are two million street vendors in the city, of whom only about 100,000 operate with legal permits, in a metropolis of nine million people.
Those who work without permits do so under the protection of leaders like Sánchez Barrios. “We know very clearly where each organization’s territory begins and ends, and we respect each other,” she explains. But the stability of those agreements is far from certain. Over the past decade, according to street vendor leadership, there have been 14 murders, most carried out by young, masked assailants who flee through the labyrinthine streets of the center, burning rubber on a motorbike — just like in the attack on Sánchez Barrios herself.
In the city center, Sánchez Barrios’s territory borders that of other leaders, many of them connected to La Unión Tepito — a criminal group with which Sánchez Barrios has long been linked, though the justice system has never been able to prove it.
“Each [La Unión] leader has their streets, which they control with their own people,” says a senior police official from the city. “Sometimes, for certain things, they work together. There are many criminal cells, and when we catch one, someone else tries to take over their streets. In Tepito, that’s daily life. Either you pay, or you get kidnapped. Some of these guys are even in prison, with nearly life sentences, but they still control everything from inside. You can’t interfere because that street belongs to them — and if you do, there’ll be a shootout,” he adds.
Extortion of vendors brings in significant income. It’s so normalized, the officer says, that sometimes vendors come to the police asking them to negotiate with the criminals to get them to lower the fees. “But the point is they shouldn’t be charging at all!” he exclaims.
The practice of charging for “protection” started as a rumor in the center and spread during the administration of Miguel Ángel Mancera (2012–2018), Sánchez Barrios recalls. “It was a time of great social chaos. People had to leave, abandon their stalls, their businesses, and they left without warning. All of a sudden it was, ‘Hey, what happened to so-and-so?’ ‘Oh, he’s not here anymore.’ They came, threatened him, extorted him, and he left,” she continues. “And they go on, arresting the heads [of the criminal groups], but it doesn’t stop. Now new leaders emerge — but they’re minors, which is what worries you most. And they get caught, and they get killed, and more minors keep appearing, and it’s completely out of control,” she concludes.
A morning two years ago, in Iztapalapa, in the eastern part of Mexico City. A woman grabs her bags and heads out to the market to do the shopping. Her son stays home. Suddenly, the phone rings. “We’ve kidnapped your mother,” they tell him. Stay sharp, they say, grab anything of value — money, jewelry. Call a taxi, they say, and go to this plaza. The boy doesn’t think, he just acts. His mother isn’t home — she went to the market. Maybe they took her. Maybe. He searches her room, looks for money, anything. He calls a taxi and leaves. The call continues on his cellphone. They’ve got him hooked. Once the son is gone, the mother returns. She sees the mess in her room, the landline off the hook. Then her cellphone rings. It’s them. They tell her they’ve kidnapped her son, that she needs to gather half a million pesos if she doesn’t want him killed. Her son is missing, the room is ransacked — her heart drops. Fortunately, she calls the police. They tell her not to send any money, that they’re on their way. And they arrive. “The woman was in shock,” says one of the responding officers. “She fainted twice.” It wasn’t easy — the criminals had been extracting information from the son, keeping him on the line, isolating him. At the same time, they used that information to intimidate the mother, to build the illusion that they knew everything about them. The officers tell the mother and other family members to send the boy text messages, explaining that it’s a scam, that no one is actually kidnapped, that it’s all a lie. Eventually, the boy — still on the line with the extortionists — sees the messages. He realizes what’s going on and hangs up. They narrowly escaped. The mother had been just moments away from making the deposit.
‘That’s violence’
In a grey, gloomy room, a man reluctantly recounts his downfall. During the pandemic, his business went under, bills piled up, and he had to start over. Starting over is expensive. Banks don’t cater to people like him — workers who live paycheck to paycheck with no credit history, no assets, no inheritance, not even an abandoned plot of land in his hometown to mortgage. So he looked for less orthodox options.
They call it gota a gota (“drop by drop”) because it traps you gradually, and by the time you realize it, you’re drowning. The man — whose name is withheld for safety reasons — began with a small loan. He repaid it and asked for another. The first lender was someone he knew, a former client, a buddy, a friend — a loan shark, sure, but a local one: even their mothers knew each other.
But soon, the man couldn’t pay. So he took out another loan, from a second lender. And when he couldn’t pay that one either, he borrowed from a third. The debt became tangled, the mess thickened. In just a few months, he owed 80,000 pesos ($4,200) in cannibalistic interest. That’s when the threats began — “You’re fucked if you don’t start paying,” “I’m coming to wreck your house, and I’ll kill you.” One day, they showed up at his business: tough guys, in big, new SUVs with no plates, armed men — “everyone in the neighborhood knows who they are,” he says. They beat him with clubs all over his body. The man fled, smashed his phone SIM, tried to disappear.
The man is about 40 years old. He tells his story in the anti-kidnapping and extortion division at Mexico City’s police headquarters — a concrete matchbox perched above the Insurgentes roundabout. A dim white light, like in an old airport, bathes the room. In the center, a U-shaped table. The man sits in the middle, beside a relative. Officers from various units — legal, cyber, tactical analysis, field investigation, psychology — 14 people total, including journalists and victims — listen and ask questions.
The man doesn’t want to be there, but he has to be: he left the neighborhood, but his parents stayed behind. It didn’t take the extortionists long to find them. He’s in shock, forgetting names and dates. An officer with slicked hair, an unbuttoned denim shirt, and urgency in his voice leads the session. He stops the man when he stumbles, asks for details, tries to establish a logical chronology — a testimony that could hold up in court. He asks questions like:
—Were you ever threatened with a gun?
—They just took it out.
—That’s a threat, man, that’s violence.
The man wants to flee the city. He’s afraid they might find him. A psychologist chimes in with a gentle voice: “The truth is, what you’ve been doing hasn’t worked. Fear is paralyzing you. I think you’re very distrustful, and we understand, but we need you to trust us.”
It’s not all paranoia: it’s only natural that he’s suspicious. He’s spent his life in a neighborhood where the only difference between the police and the criminals is the uniform. And sometimes not even that. The real challenge is getting the victims of extortion — usually people with little money who are in great need — to believe that this group is different from the uniformed officers they’re used to dealing with, to trust in institutions despite everything their lived experience tells them.
—There are more of us on this side, we are the people who are her to support you.
—And what about retaliation? The father of the person threatening me works at the Secretariat.
—We are the Secretariat.
—Yeah, but you hear a lot about corruption and all that.
On a different day, a security official in the Cuauhtémoc mayor’s office will admit: “Reporting a crime is a nightmare. It’s a system designed to discourage reporting. The black hole is the justice system.” Today, the multidisciplinary team needs the complaint. One after another, they step in. They say things like, “We won’t make false promises,” “We’re different, that’s why we’re listening to you.”
They convince him: if the extortionists wanted to kill him, he’d be dead by now. They tell him: what they want is your money. They repeat: we can’t guarantee anything, but when we show up, these kinds of gangs vanish.
The man will leave the Security Secretariat and go file the complaint.
February, Colonia Obrera neighborhood. Two men arrive on a motorcycle at a stationery shop. They’re wearing navy-blue vests with the Cuauhtémoc borough logo on the lapel. One of them keeps his helmet on, though with the visor up, his face is clearly visible. They tell the shop owner they’re conducting a document inspection. Without thinking much, she hands over her papers. They barely glance at them and say she’s missing two or three documents. That they’ll have to shut her down — unless she gives them 10,000 pesos ($530) right then and there. They negotiate. She says she has 1,400 pesos ($73) in cash, nothing more. No problem, they say. They give her a bank account number and tell her to deposit the rest. She deposits part of the money, and they leave. But the next day, they return. They ask for the remaining amount — a few thousand pesos — but Juana Ibarra (a false name) is beginning to sense something’s off. She asks them for the official notice specifying the required documents, and tells them to show her their IDs. One of them, visibly uncomfortable, quickly flashes an ID. He says — falsely — that he gave her the notice yesterday. In the end, they leave. They don’t come back. She thinks it over and ends up reporting them. She realizes that the name of the account holder she transferred the money to is right there, clearly printed on the receipt.
A black Audi
Rubén Orozco and his wife attended a similar meeting in mid-February. They sat at the U-shaped table in the room and recounted what had happened to them. How they were visited by a couple — the “clowns,” as their son had called them—the subsequent call, the extortion, the credit card withdrawals, the family’s escape… The agents listened and took notes. Some asked questions, some general, others more specific: about the clowns’ appearance, their vehicle, the references to the withdrawals, etc.
Orozco and his wife felt the air fill with oxygen, he more than she did. They had been sleeping in motels for two weeks, their children were scattered in different places. But what they had heard in that gray and sad room had filled them with confidence. They thought about going back right away. The agents had given them an “eagle code,” which served to alert neighborhood patrols. “From that very day, they put up a security tent on the corner,” Orozco recounts.
The police got to work. The director of the “snow leopards” — the internal name for the anti-kidnapping and extortion unit — assigned the case to one of his unit chiefs. The first step was to check the public cameras in the area, see if they caught the clowns and their vehicle, try to reconstruct the route they took after visiting the taco stand, and hopefully locate their hideout. But the plan fell apart almost immediately. Since more than seven days had passed since the visit, the images had been erased — as is protocol.
Months later, on a cool morning in May, Chief Jaguar, a pseudonym to protect the officer’s identity, recalls the investigation. “With cameras, it depends; some erase footage after seven days, others keep it for up to three months, depending a lot on the place,” he explains. The police also rely on private security cameras, often better than public ones, with higher resolution and even audio. But that time, luck wasn’t on their side. Near Orozco’s taco stand is a gas station with cameras, but the images weren’t very good either.
Jaguar and his team changed strategy. Orozco had authorized cardless withdrawals for the extortionists, who had collected the money shortly after. They had to find the ATMs where the withdrawals were made, verify the day and time, and again check the cameras. There they got lucky. At one ATM camera, they could see the woman who had gone to the taco stand. At another, the car she arrived in at Ruben’s Tacos: a black Audi sports car. The license plate wasn’t visible, but the rear window had a sticker that was visible, a distinctive feature that helps identify vehicles.
It was quite a challenge — looking for a needle in a haystack. “The ATM camera showing the car was on Circuito Interior,” says Chief Jaguar, referring to the major ring road around the extended city center. “We realized there was a highway arch nearby,” one of the government checkpoints with super-high-definition cameras on major roads, capable of capturing license plates of cars passing underneath. They had the withdrawal time — the black Audi should have passed under the arch minutes before. “The first sweep yielded 300 possible cars,” he recounts. “Then, in a second sweep, we narrowed it down to just Audis and cut it to 10. Finally, we were left with one — the only one with the sticker on the rear window.”
Once the car was located, obtaining the license plate numbers was almost automatic. “We immediately requested the history for that plate, and saw it had passed under the same arch multiple times recently,” says the police chief. The trick was to wait. When the black Audi passed under another arch again, the C-5 cameras — the public surveillance system — would track it. They had to wait a few days, but it finally happened. In the second week of February, the black Audi passed under an arch in the north of the city. The alarm went off and C-5 operators tracked it to the Pensador Mexicano neighborhood, at the northeast corner of Circuito Interior. Jaguar sent two undercover cars with agents. They soon spotted the vehicle.
“The problem is that they had removed the license plate and the sticker was covered up,” the police commander explains. The officers stood guard for two days, until finally, a woman emerged from a house near the black Audi, holding the license plate. It was the same woman caught in the footage from the ATM and the taco stand.
“She had dyed her hair black, but her plastic surgery gave her away,” Jaguar continues. The officers photographed her, watched as she opened the car, threw the license plate in the back, got in, and drove off. They didn’t arrest her yet, they still needed to close the case with phone data. When the cell phone company gave them the information, they confirmed that the device had been used right there, in the Pensador Mexicano neighborhood.
Just when it seemed everything was over, the two men on the motorcycle showed up. They approached his stall, in a street market in the south of the city. They forced him to follow them to a deserted street. They pulled out a gun. Handed him a phone. Immediately, he heard a familiar voice. “You shouldn’t have stopped answering,” it said. The nightmare was starting all over again. From October of last year to the end of December, Humberto Robledo — a fictitious name — had been paying his extortionists hundreds of thousands of pesos under the threat that they would harm his family. Even during the final payment, when the amount had reached nearly two million pesos, he told them: “That’s it.” The criminal responded, “Go live your life in peace.” Robledo changed his SIM card, hoping to start fresh. But by late January, the men on the motorcycle returned to the market. He didn’t know what to do anymore. He had reported the case from the beginning, but the Public Prosecutor’s Office had sent him in circles without resolving anything. In the end, he and his wife went to the police. “When they arrived, they were devastated,” said one of the officers who assisted them. The first step was to sever all contact with the criminals. The perpetrators still haven’t been caught, but with the support of a psychologist and the ongoing presence of the police, at least now they can breathe again.
Second visit
The extortionists succumbed to the most human of mistakes: greed. Not satisfied with the 20,000 pesos they had already squeezed out of the Orozco family the first time, they came back for more. This happened in mid-February, when the police had already located the black Audi in Pensador Mexicano. By then, Rubén Orozco and his wife had just reopened their stand. The man had changed his phone number — a move that blocked the extortionists.
“It was in the space of two or three days that we lost sight of the woman,” says Jaguar, a lapse in vigilance. The woman had left the house one night with the car, and during the shift change, the police got distracted.
Around that time, the woman — whom the police later identified as Fabiola — returned to Ruben’s Tacos in the black Audi. This time, she was accompanied by another man. Alert, Orozco got down from the stand as soon as he saw her, his hands sticky from chopping suadero meat. He stopped her in the middle of the sidewalk: he didn’t want her to get any closer to his family. She told him to give her another 20,000 pesos right away. From the car, the man yelled at him, “Right now, get going!” He reached into his apron pocket and pulled out 2,000 pesos, the only cash he had. “And the girl grabs it, gets in the car, and they drive off. As if to say, ‘We’ll be back, right?’ or something like that,” Orozco says.
Orozco immediately called Chief Jaguar and told him what had happened. He told him they had arrived in the black Audi, that it was the same woman, but a different man. The police located the vehicle immediately, thanks to security cameras. Days later, Jaguar’s colleagues arrested Fabiola, her companion on the day of the first visit to the taco shop, Sareb, and another woman. All three were in the black Audi, with drugs in their pockets. Jaguar called Orozco to go to the Prosecutor’s Office to identify them. Of the three, the man recognized Fabiola and Sareb.
The Orozcos now live peacefully back in their neighborhood. They recently celebrated their 20th anniversary with tacos for all their customers. Regulars come by, the family serves, and the air is filled with the smell of fried meat, boiled tongue, sauces, and cut lime. It’s a scene of calm that’s hard to match. Of the extortion gang, at least two people remain to be caught — the man from the second visit, and a third person who appears in one of the ATM cameras. Orozco doesn’t seem worried.
“You can’t live in a state of psychosis,” he says. “For your mental health, you shouldn’t be afraid of everything and nothing, right? Yes, it happened to you, okay. But it doesn’t mean it’s going to happen to you all the time.”
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