| Summary: | The kidnapping of the American businessman William Oscar Jenkins in Puebla in 1919 has not been erased from Mexico's popular historical memory. Popular wisdom says that Jenkins kidnapped himself to provoke the United States intervention and end the Carranza regime, and that the diplomat and businessman cynically parlayed the ransom paid by the Mexican government into wealth and influence in his host country. Besides Charles Cumberland's article, published in the 1950's, few historians have approached this case and discussed the popular version, thus perpetuating it. This paper undertakes a detailed analysis of the case, mainly its local political context and the logic of self-kidnapping, and concludes that the widely sustained idea of Jenkins' self-abduction is very unlikely.
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