Buenos Aires mayor speaks from experience when he condemns kidnapping
Published June 20, 2014
Our inboxes have been jammed with statements from politicos condemning the kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers.
These are both welcome and par for the course. Who doesn’t want to know the world is watching out for missing children; on the other hand, who doesn’t expect it?
One expression of solidarity that stood out, however, was in a story filed today by our Argentina correspondent, Diego Melamed. Mauricio Macri, the mayor of Buenos Aires, joined 19 other mayors attending a conference in Jerusalem in condemning the abduction.
But he has a special stake in speaking out. Macri himself is a former kidnap victim.
From Diego:
“Israeli suffering has to be understood,” the mayor of Buenos Aires, Mauricio Macri, told a reporter at the conference. “From afar, it is easy to give advice, but you have to be in Israel to really understand the situation.”
Macri, who himself spent 14 days in captivity during a kidnapping for ransom in 1991, added that abduction “is the most perverse situation you can find yourself in. I do not know if it is worse for the victim or the family.”
