When the Venezuelan baseball star Wilson Ramos was freed from his two-day kidnapping ordeal last week he flung his arms around his rescuers and wept in disbelief. It was a desperate embrace that Miguel Dao recognised only too well.

"Rescuing somebody who has been kidnapped is one of those strange situations where the victim is forced to have total trust in a stranger," said Dao, a 62-year-old Caracas-based kidnap negotiator. "A very special kind of bond arises."

Once the head of the Technical Investigative Police, Venezuela's answer to the FBI, Dao is now part of a growing team of negotiators and private security contractors battling to stem a tide of kidnappings in what has become Latin America's abduction capital.

"My first advice is always to inform the police, preferably from a phone different to their own, and to delay paying a ransom as long as possible," said the former lawyer, whose firm is based in the upmarket Chuao neighbourhood.

Ten years ago kidnappings were a distant concern for most Venezuelans, registering only via the occasional news report of ranchers being seized along the border with Colombia.

This year more than 1,000 traditional ransom kidnappings have been reported in Venezuela. Add to that a spike in the number of so-called secuestros express, or express kidnappings – in which victims are abducted and frog-marched to cash machines – and an unknown number of unreported crimes and the true toll is likely to be far higher. Venezuela's National Statistics Institute claims that more than 16,000 people were kidnapped in 2009.

The recent abduction of 24-year-old Ramos, a Major League baseball player with the Washington Nationals who was freed after a gunfight between police and his captors, served as a reminder of the threat.

"People are worried," said Johanssen Mendoza, 36, a one-time bodyguard who now runs a Caracas-based transport company offering security details and advice to VIPs and foreign diplomats. "We are doing really bad and it's going to get worse. Every day that goes by with corrupt institutions and rampant impunity, things get worse."

Venezuela is far from the only Latin American country to have suffered from the blight of kidnapping. In 2000, at the height of Colombia's kidnapping epidemic, 3,572 people were taken captive as the battle between government forces and leftist Farc guerrillas raged.

A decade ago Brazil's economic capital, Sao Paulo, found itself at the centre of a major kidnapping boom. One local plastic surgeon made headlines for his painstaking reconstructive operations on freed captives whose ears had been severed and sent to relatives as proof of life.

Since then the city's authorities have succeeded in reducing the number of kidnappings, from around 300 in 2001 to 70 last year. Venezuela's statistics are moving in the opposite direction. Aside from the kidnappings, the number of murders has also ballooned, from 4,550 in 1998 – the year before Hugo Chávez came to power – to anywhere between 14,000 and 17,000 a year now.

A recent security report by the US state department warned: "Caracas continues to be notorious for the brazenness of certain high-profile, violent crimes such as murder, robberies and kidnappings. Kidnappings are a growing industry in Venezuela. Because groups that specialise in these types of crimes operate with impunity … more entrepreneurial criminals hit the streets."

Criminals are not the only ones benefiting from the crisis. "Since the increase in violence in the late 1990s, security companies have multiplied," said Mendoza, the former bodyguard. "People seek to find what the state has failed to give them [security]."

"The first company to armour cars appeared in 1999," said Dao, who partly blames Venezuela's chronically underfunded security forces for the surge in abductions. "Today there are 22 companies and they cannot meet the demand."

Facing growing discontent, Venezuelan authorities have started to act. In 2009 the government passed an anti-extortion law allowing the assets of victims' relatives to be frozen to prevent ransoms from being paid, hence deterring criminals.

But Dao claimed the law had merely made people more reluctant to report crimes. "It is an absurd measure which further victimises the kidnap victim. The focus should be on prevention but you are talking about a force that is so ill-equipped that in some rescue missions they have to borrow vehicles from the victim's relatives."

With 2012 presidential elections approaching, security has become a key campaigning issue. "The top priority is security: to guarantee that Venezuelans are safe to go out on to the streets," Leopoldo López, a leading Chávez rival, said this week at a debate between potential opposition candidates.

Hours earlier, Chilean authorities announced that Juan Carlos Fernández, their consul in Caracas, had become Venezuela's latest kidnapping victim. "After two hours in the hands of his captors, [the consul] was abandoned on a public street," Chile's foreign ministry said in a statement. "Unfortunately, Fernández was shot … beaten and threatened."