Alert: Cuban doctor kidnapped in Tapachula, Mexico, ransomed for $10,000

Cuban doctor Adrián Pupo Ojeda was kidnapped in Tapachula, Mexico, and his captors are asking for 10,000 dollars to free him, according to his family from Puerto Padre, in the eastern province of Las Tunas, and confirmed by ADN Cuba after contacting his relatives in the island.

Iván Maceo Silva, Pupo's childhood friend and resident of Texas, revealed to ADN Cuba that the kidnapping occurred on Nov. 5, around six in the afternoon, in the central plaza of Tapachula, Chiapas, about 15 kilometers from the border with Guatemala. According to Maceo Silva, the last time they saw Pupo was when he boarded a taxi.

Subsequently, the kidnappers allowed the doctor to contact his family to ask them to get the ransom money.

The friend claims to have heard audio recordings of the kidnappers talking with Pupo's family and, due to the accent and vocabulary, he does not believe that the captors are Mexican.

They have requested that the money be sent to Mexico through Western Union and to do so they provided copies of three Venezuelan passports with the necessary information to make the payment, as Maceo explained to ADN Cuba.

Pupo, 27 years old and father of a small child, was described by Maceo Silva as a noble person, who graduated from medicine with great effort.

According to Maceo, the young man left Cuba on Nov. 1 bound for Bolivia and, from there, he traveled to Nicaragua and then to Mexico, where he arrived on Nov. 5, the same day he was kidnapped.

Once he arrived in Mexico, the doctor looked for accommodations and sought a job in the Tapachula area since he did not have enough money to be able to pay a coyote to take him to the United States.

Once he boarded the taxi to return to the house where he had rented, he was kidnapped.

Journalist Mario Pentón was the first to report the news through his account on the social network X, where he broadcast a video of Pupo's family asking for the young man to be released.

According to the open data portal of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), in the last decade some 4,865 migrants have died on the border between Mexico and the United States, the majority due to drowning in the Rio Grande River while trying to cross in improvised rafts that were lost into the currents.

But the danger that Pupo faces is due to a cause of a very different nature: according to the EFE Spanish language news agency, migrants have reported a wave of mass kidnappings by organized crime in Tapachula, where criminals mark migrants on the arms and They demand money to free them.