From lawless homeland, demand for ransom

(Correction: Because of a reporting error, a story about local Haitians' concerns about kidnappings in Haiti in Monday's City & Region section contained an incorrect quotation attributed to Gerthy Lahens. The quotation should have read, ''My son's godfather, they kidnapped four members of his family. They had no choice but to pay the ransom, thank God they did not harm them . . ." Also, because of a photographer's error, Lahens's given name was misspelled in a caption with the story.)

One evening in late June, Roberthe got the call everyone with relatives in Haiti has come to dread.

Armed men had snatched three of her close family members from their car on a busy street in Port-Au-Prince. The kidnappers wanted $300,000 to release them. If Roberthe and her family did not raise the money in a few days, their relatives would die.

''It's like our life was stopped," said Roberthe, who did not want her last name published because she is afraid for her family's safety. ''It was very hard for my family and I. . . . We were crying and praying, because we were waiting for a miracle to happen."

Dozens of people are kidnapped in Haiti each week, victims of a crime that has become an industry in the desperate and deteriorating Caribbean nation. The epidemic of abductions is the talk of Boston's 15,000-strong Haitian community, the graphic stories passed around at the Haitian churches and at a Bon Appetit restaurant in Dorchester.

Because so many Haitians have relatives in the United States, each of the kidnappings touches the community here. Many people seem to know someone who has been a victim, or a relative who has received frenzied calls from Haiti begging them to help raise thousands of dollars. Few who have ransomed relatives are willing to speak about it, afraid that those who remain in Haiti are still vulnerable and that the gangs will come back for them.

''This is affecting the community a lot," said Jean Peres Nazaire, a Mattapan doctor who treats many Haitians and whose classmate from medical school was recently kidnapped and killed in Haiti. ''It's terrible. A lot of people are getting depressed; a lot of people cannot go home. People's minds are affected."

Fewer local Haitians dare venture home to see relatives, or even to attend funerals. They say they would be easy targets: The violence in the nation of 7.6 million has become too commonplace, too random.

''When I was in Haiti [in June], I nearly got snatched," said Pierre Nicolas, 50, a math and science teacher who has lived in Milton for 27 years. ''A band of seven people, armed with the latest machine guns, they circled the people with me. If they knew I was from the US, they would have kidnapped me, but I was wearing dirty jeans and a T-shirt. Maybe that saved my life."

Mary Cantave, a room attendant at a Boston hotel, is too afraid to go to Haiti, though she had planned to spend a two-week vacation visiting her sick sister there this summer. ''I need to go," she said, tears rolling down her cheeks as she stood outside the Haitian Consulate on Boylston Street on a recent sweltering afternoon. ''She is in [the] hospital; she has collapsed because of the pressure. People tell me, 'Don't go, the country is too hot.' I want to go, but I'm scared."

Most families of people who have been kidnapped do not bother to go to the police: Instead, they immediately accede to the gangs' demands. A United Nations peacekeeping force of 7,600 is stretched thin, barely able to contain myriad outbreaks of violence in the nation. A police force of 3,000 is vastly inadequate to address the country's crime problems, say those who have visited recently.

Unemployment in Haiti has hit 70 percent. Some families are so poor that they eat cakes made from soil, butter, and water.

Haitians in Boston often express frustration that the international community has done little to alleviate the nation's problems. They have held rallies outside Haitian consulates and prayer meetings like the one attended by several hundred at Roxbury Community College on Thursday night. So far, they say, their attempts to shine a light on Haiti's problems have failed to bring more of a commitment from developed countries.

''This is a lawless society and a failed state," said US Representative William D. Delahunt, who visited Haiti in April. ''This is not about ideology. It's about survival in the worst of all possible circumstances. There is no rule of law, no police force as we know it: They are obviously overwhelmed and understaffed, and there is considerable corruption."

Without anywhere else to turn, those who want to save captive relatives appeal to Haitians in the United States.

After she got the call saying her relatives had been kidnapped, Roberthe and 10 family members gathered in her mother's living room in Boston. They managed to come up with $80,000 between them. They knew the kidnappers would accept that amount. But even so, they worried that their relatives could be killed anyway, ''because when they take some member of your family, sometimes you give the money, and they are still killing them," Roberthe said.

But as Roberthe and her family were preparing to transfer the money, a police raid in Haiti killed seven of the captors and liberated her relatives. Roberthe said she knows how lucky her family is, but she said her relatives are even more vulnerable now.

Roberthe declined to say where her mother lives, and which of her relatives were kidnapped, because she said she is afraid kidnappers will be able to identify them and go after them again.

''I am afraid for them," she said. ''They are hiding now. For myself, for all my family, life will never be the same again. Those kidnappers, I call them terrorists. I want President Bush and [UN Secretary General] Kofi Annan and everybody in power to do something immediately."

Three weeks ago, Gerthy Lahens was contacted by relatives of a 19-year-old man kidnapped at a bus station in Port-Au-Prince. The community activist helped coordinate the family's response, spending hours every day on the phone with the man's frenzied grandmother and cousin. She urged them to borrow the $10,000 ransom from whomever they could. She would help them repay the loans by raising money from her contacts here, she told them.

''I was crying everywhere," Lahens said. ''I couldn't sleep. I have a 20-year-old son. Everybody seemed not to know what to do."

The man's cousin, who lives in Boston, feared retaliation, and refused to be interviewed for this story.

The money was raised and sent to the man's mother in northern Haiti. She traveled hours to deliver his ransom. When the kidnappers did not meet her, she was terrified they had killed him. A couple of days later, she discovered that the police had raided their hideout, killed some of the kidnappers, and were holding her son for her.

''I know of many, many other cases," Lahens said. ''My son's godfather, they killed four members of his family. They had no choice but to pay the ransom, thank God they did not harm them. Just imagine those poor people who have no choice but to live there. People here talk about it every day. They say, 'Please, God, don't let me go there.' "

But Lahens continues to visit Haiti, to do relief work. In the past, the violence in Haiti was mostly political, she said, as loyalists to former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, ousted in February 2004, battled his opponents. But as chaos has descended upon Haiti, poverty has surpassed politics among kidnappers' motivations, and made their crimes more frequent and random.

Yvonne Abraham can be reached at abraham@globe.com.