http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/16307365.htmlTheirs is a cosmopolitan existence: plans to study abroad at a university, designer labels, studying with a friend at Starbucks, where the price tag for two double espressos equals the daily minimum wage. But for the wealthy across this city and in other posh pockets of Latin America, raising their rich kids also requires a level of security that, critics argue, spawns a life of isolation and alienation -- cut off from swaths of their own culture, watching too much TV, in the care of nannies. ''They don't go to the park. They don't go out. They order in and the maids bring to their rooms. I think it is a lost generation,'' declares Guadalupe Loaeza, a writer and intellectual who has for years ruffled elite sensibilities.
Cut off from poorer pockets of society, she says, affluent Mexican children ''live in a golden cage, they live in a prison,'' says Loaeza. ``They don't understand the world where they are living.'' Now, she says, she has detected spiraling eating disorders and even younger drug abuse among the elites, a sign, she says, of their social alienation. It all comes down to security in a nation where wealthy parents see the No. 1 threat to their child as kidnap and ransom -- not a broken leg on the ski slopes, nor being hit by a car crossing the road without looking both ways. So much so that time and again wealthy executives and other Mexicans of privilege turned down The Miami Herald request to document their children's lavish lifestyles.
''Why expose your children to the press?'' says David Robillard, director of the Mexico City office of the Kroll Inc. risk assessing security consultants. ``You're only allowing a kidnapper to profile them.'' Which is why, in this age of the Internet and Web-profiling, with rare exception, The Miami Herald is identifying wealthy children and their parents in this article by their first names, omitting their neighborhoods and school names and the locations of their hangouts in exchange for conversations about their affluent lifestyles. ''I'm not really worried about it -- but my parents are,'' says Diego, 19, son of an insurance executive, as he hung out with other teens after school at a McDonald's frequented by the kids from a posh Catholic school.
One of his friends was kidnapped two months ago, he said, held for two weeks, and then freed for a sum of cash he does not know. His uncle, he said, was held for 12 hours and released for ''big money,'' he said. ''It's like an express kidnapping,'' he adds, softly. Even before these episodes, he said, he had to call his mom by cellphone four to five times a day, each time he drives from one place to another. Once home for the night, he says, he shows himself to his mother -- a ritual that will likely continue until he goes to university, in Canada. Adds Claudia, 44, whose three kids shuttle between a private Jewish school, sports and exclusive riding stables where her 14-year-old daughter Orly trains five times a week on her mare, Luna:
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