[quote=SD Realtor]My friends didn’t get killed. They just had over 10k in personal property stolen, their trucks stolen and were told to lay down on the hillside with guns pointed to their heads.

No media involved. They lived.

It was good enough for me not to go down anymore.[/quote]

Exactly SD Realtor. That’s more of the stuff that happens over and over. While deathzone (appropriate screen name) seems to be obsessed about death/murders, most reasonable people keep in mind what happened to your friends.

That kind of thing there in many countries is normal and like your friends, they lived to tell about it and didn’t tell it to the media, police, etc.

When my taxi got pulled over in Brazil and a group of police officers had their guns out and asked my friends and I to empty our pockets we were ready to give them all our money. Fortunately another group of friends was behind us and stopped. And my co-worker in the other taxi spoke Portuguese. (mine is conversational) but he was totally fluent and fortunately he knew other people in their government so he threw out a name and we were on our way.

But if we DID get robbed, we wouldn’t have reported it and just chalked it up to cost of being in a corrupt country. Just like most locals do and don’t report it.