Secuestro: A Story of a Kidnapping

Kidnapping isn’t simply a crime in Columbia – it’s a business. A very big business, as demonstrated in the documentary Secuestro: A Story of a Kidnapping. Directed by Colombian and first-time filmmaker Camila Motta, Secuestro focuses on her own family’s tumultuous experience when her sister, Sylvia, was grabbed off a street in Bogota in 1985 and held for ransom.

Sylvia was finally released, but only after several months of anxiety and hard-boiled negotiations between the kidnappers and Camila’s father, a businessman who was forced to bury familial feelings behind an icy wall of financial dickering.

A similar degree of cold-bloodedness is used by the filmmaker in constructing Secuestro. Though Motta is detailing an event that’s obviously left deep psychological wounds in her family, she rarely belabors the point. It’s not until late in Secuestro that we realize just how close her father is to a total emotional breakdown. Through most of his conversations with the kidnappers (we hear the actual tapes), he plays a penny-pinching jerk who seems more concerned with cutting a cheap deal. As horrifying as this sounds, his behavior was critical to his daughter’s survival – the kidnappers expected him to bargain fiercely and would have distrusted him if he’d done otherwise.

The kidnappers, meanwhile, were busy cutting their own deals. The gang’s leaders were promising people good pay in exchange for help with the job. (In the end, however, they left their business partners with nothing but chump change.) And during the protracted ransom negotiations, they discussed selling their victim to another kidnapper in order to score a quick profit. The film even implies that the gang had a financial portfolio on the Motta family. Despite some vague political allusions, the criminals were more versed in the Wall Street Journal than The Communist Manifesto.

It’s the filmmaker who brings the politics into Secuestro. Interlaced through the movie are references to the culture of violence that’s existed in Colombia since the beginning of the European conquest of the Americas. Motta argues that this has left a political legacy in which it’s viewed as acceptable for one group to brutally suppress others in order to achieve their wants and desires. The connections between conquest and kidnapping are simple: if the haves can do it, then so can the have-nots.

This crazy pattern of violence is Secuestro’s real subject matter, and Motta is chillingly accurate in her presentation of a culture drenched in the blood of a stolen land.

And Motta isn’t just talking about Latin America. She now lives in New York. It’s the entire Western Hemisphere she’s concerned with.