Mexican businessman Jorge Hernandez abruptly relocated his family to Houston last year, terrified that family members would be abducted by kidnappers.
He had ample reason to be afraid. He left in August, days after a father was kidnapped for ransom as he dropped his child off at the same school Hernandez’s children attended in a north Mexico city.
“One night, I told my wife ‘Pack the bags — we’re leaving,’" Hernandez said. “The fear we felt caused us to get in the car and drive for 12 hours to get to Houston.”
The 43-year-old businessman joined a growing number of affluent and middle-class Mexicans fleeing comfortable lives in Mexico for the comparative safety of Houston and other major Texas cities. They are desperate to escape an unprecedented wave of lawlessness in their home country where warring drug cartels — whose fighting claimed more than 6,000 victims last year — have also taken up kidnapping as a lucrative business.
Monterrey, the nation’s third-largest city and Mexico’s industrial powerhouse, had two kidnappings a day last year, according to the El Manana newspaper.....
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