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Before Deciding To Retire To A Foreign Country Please Do Careful Research
2013 Jun 10, 11:19pm 406 views 3 comments
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A dear friend of ours moved to Ecuador. She quickly discovered that there was a huge problems with kidnappings in Ecuador. She demanded that I remove all images of she and her children from You Tube and blogs.
That's just stupid. These kidnappings have been going on for years in Ecuador. She didn't even go to the state department or CIA country website before moving? There have been warnings about avoiding the Columbia border area for 15 years or more. Here's an article about a kidnapping from 1996 http://www.nytimes.com/1996/09/10/nyregion/ex-hostage-wants-us-warnings-about-dangers-in-ecuador.html?src=pm
The majority the kidnappings are in Guayaquil or Quito and almost all of those involve taxi's hailed on the street at night. If she's not in those 2 cities flagging taxi's down on the street at night or hiking the boonies on the Columbian border then the odds are pretty low of being kidnapped.
The state department web site says the US embassy staff in Quito and the consulate staff in Guayaquil use vetted taxi services and call for pickup rather than hailing taxi's on the street and advise citizens to do the same. It's really not rocket science to be safe in any country. If you don't want to be a crime victim then don't go where there is crime.
Americans make for easy pickins, because of their lifestyles and lack of survival skills. Between the western diet that most eat, which stymies brain activity and promotes poor muscular structure, slow reflexes, impaired vision, perpetual sickness, and the general lack of attention to and understanding of, their surroundings. Most are sitting ducks
Reject the usfedgov promoted and subsidized western diet, and hone your survival skills, and you lessen your chances of becoming a victim.
Ecuador is on a charm offensive right now. They send out videos of happy and content US citizens who have retired to a small city in Ecuador. We are told that medical care is very cheap and the cost of living is low. The local population is happy with their new gringo neighbors.
Please contrast this with an ordeal that I went through Friday night and Saturday morning. A dear friend of ours moved to Ecuador. She quickly discovered that there was a huge problems with kidnappings in Ecuador. She demanded that I remove all images of she and her children from You Tube and blogs. I calmly pointed out to her that anti-kidnapping experts never advice the clients they are hired to protect to remove all images from the web. I gave her a detailed report from Startfor on how to defend yourself against kidnapping. After all of this she kept hysterically demanding that I remove all of her images from the web. It took me some hours but I complied with her request.
I then did a lot of research on Ecuador and the results were not nice. In recent years eleven US citizens have vanished on the border between Colombia and Ecuador. At the same time there have been some 573 reported "Express Kidnappings" in the country.(I suspect that many more such kidnappings were never reported to the authorities) In this scenario one is kidnapped and forced to go to banks and draw all of the money out of their accounts. After all money is collected, the kidnap victim is generally released unharmed. I read reports of retirees being cheated by local lawyers and real estate agents when they went to buy a home or an apartment in that country.
The moral of this story is that it is vital to do some very serious and involved research before you seriously consider retiring to a foreign country. Google is a good place to start. Also carefully read US Embassy reports on any country that you are seriously considering for retirement.
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