IF IT had not been for the previously untapped detective skills and sheer determination of his mother, Hugo Alberto Wallace would have been just another of the thousands of victims of unsolved crimes in Mexico.

After leaving a cinema with his date in Mexico City last July, the 36-year-old businessman was kidnapped. His distraught mother, María Isabel Miranda Wallace, went to the police but met with the indifference that discourages many Mexicans from reporting abductions.

An estimated 90 per cent of kidnappings — which some criminologists suggest may number 7,000 a year — go unreported through fear of revenge or expectation of police inaction. “The police did nothing,” Señora Wallace told The Times. She was not surprised but, unlike many Mexicans, she refused to give up hope. She converted her family into an impromptu detective agency that tracked down four of her son’s kidnappers in a dangerous trail that she believes may lead to England. During her search she has had a pistol shoved in her face and received death threats from the families of her quarry.

Her first move was to contact her son’s mobile phone company. She traced his last call to within a ten-block area, then the entire family scoured the area until they found Hugo’s car. “When I found it I began to sob,” she said. “Suddenly someone came up to me and told me that they had originally seen the car around the corner.”

A watchman said that a woman matching the description of Hugo’s date lived in a building across the street. Mrs Wallace found a boy who said that he had heard a shot in the night and that his mother had been hired to clean up blood. But the people there said that there had been a party, and the boy’s mother denied the story.

The police again did nothing, so Señora Wallace’s family took turns watching the building. Neighbours told her that the woman she was seeking was a dancer for hire. Señora Wallace tracked down her manager and, pretending to be a client, received pictures of his dancers. She learnt that the dancer was from Guadalajara and found her mother’s address in the phone book. There, she waited until the mother was away, then told a neighbour that she urgently needed to contact the daughter for a dance job. Señora Wallace received a phone number, went to the phone company and matched a Mexico City address to the number.

Once again she started surveillance and found that the dancer was living with a former policeman. The amateur detectives were spotted by their targets, who, ironically, mistook them for kidnappers plotting an abduction and called the police. Señora Wallace had to explain to the police that she was stalking kidnappers herself. She finally persuaded federal anti-kidnap police to raid the house. The dancer was captured but her lover escaped.

Señora Wallace tracked him down at the house of another girlfriend. At a stakeout she accidentally bumped into him. “Suddenly, I see him crossing the street,” Señora Wallace said. “I scream out to him that he give himself up because he is surrounded. He insulted me and pulled out a gun. My brother was with me. He grabbed the man’s legs and he fell to the ground.”

This time the police caught him. With two gang members accounted for, she used a poster campaign to track down two others. She identified the last member of the gang as Jacobo Tagle Dobin.

Señora Wallace alleges that Señor Dobin set up her son with his fateful date and that he is on the run with a girlfriend named Brenda. Señora Wallace believes that they could be hiding out in Kent, where Brenda lived for a year. All four suspects are awaiting trial, but Hugo is believed to be dead. The dancer said that she had seen him killed but refused to say where his body was, to avoid incriminating herself. It seems likely that he was shot on the night of his abduction.

Despite that harsh realisation, Señora Wallace, who has a 24-hour bodyguard, is determined to carry on, and she receives frequent calls from others facing similar situations.

“My message is that we have to change this country . . . we have to do our part, to speak out . . . I think that the problem in Mexico is that we live trapped between the indolence and apathy of the authorities and the fear that the criminals impose on us.”

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