Your Money or Your Life.(Brief Article)

It's been two years since men in police uniforms abducted Pedro Gomez in his swank Bogota neighborhood. But the wealthy rancher and businessman is still afraid to venture far from home or let a journalist use his real name. Who can blame him? On a balmy evening in 1999, Gomez was returning from work when four cops on motorcycles pulled his jeep over. As he was looking for identification, two of the men climbed into his vehicle and put a gun to his head. They bound, gagged and blindfolded him, and drove him into the mountains, where they handed him over to Marxist guerrillas from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

Gomez spent the next year tied up in a corral with dozens of other captives or marching through the jungles. He frequently pondered suicide, relieved only by thoughts of his family. If that wasn't enough, when his 24-year-old son tried to pay $800,000 in ransom, FARC guerrillas took him too, holding him for six months until the family raised an additional $100,000. "We shared the incredibly inhumane experience of kidnapping, of being far from the family, of losing all sense of time, of loneliness," says Gomez pere.

Today his home is filled with security and surveillance cameras. Even his trips to the local park are made in an armored car with bodyguards sporting bulletproof vests and submachine guns. He has not visited his farms outside Bogota in months. He fears he will be kidnapped again, or worse: "I feel like a caged animal... I can't go to the movies, take a walk or even visit a friend."

Whoever said you can never be too rich never visited Colombia. Last year more than 3,500 "wealthy" Colombians were kidnapped, including humble shopkeepers and members of the middle class. But the rich--prey to 20,000 guerrillas and dozens of organized-crime groups--were the juiciest prizes in a world-record-setting, $420 million-a-year kidnapping industry. Those who can flee, do; last year more than 600,000 people left the country. (The wait for a visa appointment at the U.S. Embassy is as long as one year.) Those who remain stoke a multimillion-dollar security industry of around-the-clock surveillance, bodyguards, armored cars and high-speed-driving courses.

North Bogota, the stamping ground of Colombia's rich and famous, is ground zero for the thriving business--240 private companies that employ 45,000 people. In the Honor and Laurel Group's "war room," special agents are glued to computer screens 24 hours a day, using satellite tracking to determine when the vehicles of their high-flying clients are in trouble. A 500-man staff of retired Army, police and intelligence operatives stands ready to race to the scene on powerful motorcycles, and exchange fire if necessary. Down the street, the Miguel Caballero Clothing Store does a $1 million-a-year business in snazzy suede vests and gabardine raincoats bulletproofed against pistols, shotguns and Uzis. Caballero's gimmick: donning a bulletproof blazer and letting prospective customers shoot him at close range. "Colombia is perhaps the only country in the world where it's not out of place to give your father a bulletproof jacket as a Christmas or birthday present," he says. ...