Drug traffickers are increasingly resorting to kidnapping

No one has seen “Madame” for four days. Madame is 77 years old, so the story could be about a worrying disappearance, as happens at this age. But Madame wasn't lost, she was kidnapped. The small town of Trévoux in eastern France was stunned. In the early hours of June 21, four hooded men stormed into the quiet neighborhood of this city of 7,000 with guns drawn and broke down the door of a small house. Madame was there, just as they had planned. She was loaded into the trunk of a BMW. The investigations carried out by the local gendarmes quickly passed into the hands of other investigators in a special unit dedicated to fighting organized crime rather than the disappearances of elderly people.

When a septuagenarian with a clean criminal record was kidnapped, one of her less immaculate sons became a target. Four days later, Madame was found shocked and weakened. Now the small town of Trévoux finds itself at the center of a wide-ranging international drug trafficking case – so sensitive that it is impossible to even use the first letter of the victim's first name – and involuntarily becomes the symbol of a growing phenomenon in France: the use of kidnapping , sometimes involving violence, to resolve commercial disputes related to drug trafficking.

There was also a man kidnapped in a supermarket parking lot in Castelmoron-sur-Lot in the east and left to die in the Migelane forest outside Bordeaux in March, and another man missing near the Swiss border in March 2023 and whose body was discovered still in flames by a hiker in the Thise community forest. The investigators interviewed responded just as briefly to these scenes, outlined in a few lines in the news pages of the regional daily newspapers: “Invoice processing against the background of drug trafficking.”

Very young offenders

Kidnapping has resurfaced in the tools of criminal organizations in France since its golden age about 40 years ago, when wealthy figures were targeted for a lucrative return on investment. Nowadays the operations are common awarded to very young teams who compensate for their inexperience with unbridled violence. Yann Sourisseau, head of the Central Office for the Fight against Organized Crime, explained: “In recent years, the phenomenon has evolved from an approach to extorting ransoms to a kind of debt collection method, especially in the drug trade, where the 'narco' He cares less and less about the dirty work and prefers to delegate it to teams that specialize in “force operations”, i.e. to young recruits.”

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