MILPITAS, Calif. — When Kevin Jenkins wanted to teach his fourth-grade students at Spangler Elementary here how to use the Internet, he created a site where they could post photographs, drawings and surveys.
And they did. But to his dismay, some of his students posted surveys like “Who’s the most popular classmate?” and “Who’s the best-liked?”
Mr. Jenkins’s students “liked being able to express themselves in a place where they’re basically by themselves at a computer,” he said. “They’re not thinking that everyone’s going to see it.”
The first wave of parental anxiety about the Internet focused on security and adult predators. But that has since given way to concerns about how their children are acting online toward their friends and rivals, and what impression their online profiles might create in the minds of college admissions officers or future employers.
Incidents like the recent suicide of a freshman girl at South Hadley High School in Massachusetts after she was bullied online and at school have reinforced the notion that many children still seem unaware how the Internet can transform typical adolescent behavior — popularity contests, cliquish snubs, macho boasts, sexual flirtations, claims about drinking and drugs — into something not only public, but also permanent.
The South Hadley case is leading some states to re-examine their laws against bullying; while more than 40 states address the issue, they tend to focus on punishment, not prevention.
Mr. Jenkins this year began using lessons from Common Sense Media, which tries to teach students to consider their online behavior before they get into trouble.
Financed largely by foundation money, Common Sense will offer a free curriculum to schools this fall that teaches students how to behave online. New York City and Omaha have decided to offer it to their public schools; Denver, the District of Columbia, Florida, Los Angeles, Maine and Virginia are considering it.
“You want to light a fire under someone’s fanny?” said Liz Perle, editor in chief of Common Sense Media. “Have your child post something that is close to a hate crime.”
And the Internet is where children are growing up. The average young person spends seven and a half hours a day with a computer, television or smart phone, according to a January study from the Kaiser Family Foundation. Considering that the time is mostly outside of school, the results suggest that almost every extracurricular hour is devoted to online life.
Common Sense’s classes, based on research by Howard Gardner, a Harvard psychology and education professor, are grouped into topics he calls “ethical fault lines”: identity (how do you present yourself online?); privacy (the world can see everything you write); ownership (plagiarism, reproducing creative work); credibility (legitimate sources of information); and community (interacting with others).
Raquel Kusunoki, a sixth-grade teacher at Spangler, recently asked Mr. Jenkins, now an educational technology specialist for the school district, to teach Common Sense classes to her students. The class listened as Mr. Jenkins read a story about a girl who got annoyed when her parents quizzed her about details from her online journal.
Lucas Navarrete, 13, asked, “What’s their right to read her personal stuff?” adding, “They have no right!”
“Maybe they’re worried,” suggested Morgan Windham, a soft-spoken girl.
“It’s public!” argued Aren Santos.
“O.K., O.K., if it was a personal diary and they read it, would you be happy?” Lucas asked. “They have no right, see?”
Mr. Jenkins asked the class if there is a difference between a private diary on paper and a public online diary. But the class could not agree.
“I would just keep it to myself and tell only people that were really, really close to me,” Cindy Nguyen said after class. “We want to have our personal, private space.”
That blurred line between public and private space is what Common Sense tries to address.
“That sense of invulnerability that high school students tend to have, thinking they can control everything, before the Internet there may have been some truth to that,” said Ted Brodheim, chief information officer for the New York City Department of Education. “I don’t think they fully grasp that when they make some of these decisions, it’s not something they can pull back from.”
Common Sense bases all its case studies on real life, and insists on the students’ participation. “If you just stand up and deliver a lecture on intellectual property, it has no meaning for the kids,” said Constance M. Yowell, director of education for the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which has provided financing.
But some media experts say that in focusing on social issues, Common Sense misses some of the larger, structural problems facing children online.
“We can’t make the awareness of Web issues solely person- and relationship-centered,” said Joseph Turow, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Children should learn things like what a cookie or a Web virus is, and how corporations profit from tracking consumers online, he said.
In San Francisco, the Schools of the Sacred Heart, related boys’ and girls’ schools, met with parents earlier this year to discuss their Common Sense pilot program with Sister Anne Wachter, the head of the girls’ school.
“The messes they get into with friends, or jumping onto someone’s site and sending a message,” she said. “They don’t know, sometimes, how to manage the social, emotional stuff that comes up.”
Crowded into a basement math classroom, the parents listened to a teacher, Bill Jennings, discuss lessons he had been trying. In front of Sister Wachter and the parents, many of whom are Catholic, he gave an example of a social-networking message the girls might see about a new student: “Amy is a slut; her mom’s a whore.”
There was startled silence from the parents.
“If I came up with five scenarios for Maya, they’d probably be so far from that — they’re not calling someone’s mother a whore,” said Sheila Chatterjee, a parent of a seventh grader.
“But the language of that is what they hear,” Mr. Jennings said.
“It’s authentic,” Ms. Chatterjee agreed.
Shirin Oshidari, who has a son in seventh grade, said this lesson seemed obvious. “To me, it’s exactly how you behave person to person,” she said. “Everything you write, the college you want to go to, they will see it. And the job you want to get, they will see it.”
Jaime Dominguez, the head of the boys school, said: “The hard part is, as adults we see that connection. They don’t.”
Working parents perpetually agonize that they don’t see enough of their children. But a surprising new study finds that mothers and fathers alike are doing a better job than they think, spending far more time with their families than did parents of earlier generations.
The study, by two economists at the University of California, San Diego, analyzes a dozen surveys of how Americans say they use their time, taken at different periods from 1965 to 2007. It reports that the amount of child care time spent by parents at all income levels — and especially those with a college education — has risen “dramatically” since the mid-1990s. (The findings by the husband-and-wife economist team of Garey Ramey and Valerie A. Ramey appear in a discussion paper presented in March at a Brookings Institution conference in Washington.)
Before 1995, mothers spent an average of about 12 hours a week attending to the needs of their children. By 2007, that number had risen to 21.2 hours a week for college-educated women and 15.9 hours for those with less education.
Although mothers still do most of the parenting, fathers also registered striking gains: to 9.6 hours a week for college-educated men, more than double the pre-1995 rate of 4.5 hours; and to 6.8 hours for other men, up from 3.7, according to an additional analysis by Betsey Stevenson and Dan Sacks, economists at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Family researchers say the news should offer relief to guilt-stricken working parents.
“Parents are feeling like they don’t have enough time with their children,” said Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute in New York, which conducts research on the work force. “It’s a function of people working so hard, and they are worried they’re shortchanging their children. I’ve never found a group of parents who believe they are spending enough time with their kids.”
Although previous studies have shown increases in parenting time starting in the 1990s, the study by the Rameys is important because it links so many time-use surveys and also breaks the data down by age of the child and education level.
The rise in child-centered time is just one of the ways the American family is changing. Couples are typically waiting longer to get married and begin having children. Divorce rates are dropping with each generation.
And notably, children are no longer so widely viewed as essential to a happy marriage. In 1990, 65 percent of Americans said that children were “very important” to a successful marriage, but by 2007, the number of adults who agreed with that statement had dropped to 41 percent, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center.
In fact, the surge in parenting time may say more about modern marriage than about modern child care practices, Dr. Stevenson said. She notes that among college-educated parents, two- to two-and-a-half hours of the increased time takes place when both parents are together. “Everybody gets in the car,” she said, “and mom and dad both cheer on the kid.”
That may reflect a rise in what Dr. Stevenson calls the “hedonic marriage,” in which couples share home and work responsibilities so they can spend more time together.
By contrast, couples from earlier generations typically had “specialized” roles that tended to keep them apart — the husband working at a job to support the family, the wife staying home to raise the children.
“We’re seeing a rise in marriages where we’re picking people we like to do activities with,” Dr. Stevenson said. “So it’s not surprising we’re going to see that some of the activities we want do together involve our children.”
So where is the extra time coming from? Women, in particular, are spending less time cooking and cleaning their homes, while men are putting in fewer hours at the office. A 2007 report in The Quarterly Journal of Economics showed that leisure time among men and women surged four to eight hours a week from 1965 to 2003.
Notably, the data in the Ramey study do not count the hours mothers and fathers spend “around” their children — at the dinner table, for example, or in solitary play. Instead, the survey tracks specific activities in which the parent is directly involved in the child’s care.
“It’s taking them to school, helping with homework, bathing them, playing catch with them in the back yard,” said a co-author of the leisure-time paper, Erik Hurst, an economist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. “Those are the activities that have increased over the last 15 to 20 years.”
Dr. Galinsky notes that although working parents typically feel guilty for not spending more time at home, children often have a different reaction. In a landmark study published as “Ask the Children” (Harper, 2000), she asked more than 1,000 children about their “one wish” for their parents. Although parents expected their children would wish for more family time, the children wanted something different.
“Kids were more likely to wish that their parents were less tired and less stressed,” Dr. Galinsky said.
By N.C. Aizenman Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, January 17, 2010; A14
Adoption agencies and prospective parents across the United States are growing increasingly alarmed about the long-term fate of an estimated 50,000 children who were living in Haitian orphanages when the earthquake hit.
Between 800 and 900 of the children were in the process of being adopted by families in the United States. An additional 1,500 had been matched with European families, mostly in France and the Netherlands.
The remaining children include many who might not technically be orphans but whose families could not afford to care for them, said Tom DiFilipo, president of the Joint Council on International Children's Services, a Washington-based child welfare organization that has taken the lead on negotiating their status with U.S. authorities.
So far, there have been no reports of deaths at orphanages, DiFilipo said. But many of Haiti's orphanages, which include 177 official government-approved facilities and 200 or so ad hoc groups providing care, remain unaccounted for. Those that have sent news often describe dire conditions.
"We're getting e-mails and texts from orphanage directors saying, 'We're out of water, our roads are blocked. We made it to the market, and there was nothing there because there was so much looting,' " DiFilipo said. "I can't put into words how worried I am. 'Extremely' doesn't cut it. It's at a crisis stage."
Although all Haitians in the earthquake zone require assistance, DiFilipo added, children in orphanages are among those with the toughest odds of survival.
"They don't have a next-door neighbor to lend them a hand. They don't have an aunt to bring them into their home or a grandmother to hold their hand and comfort them," he said. "They have a few people in an orphanage, and that's it."
Like many U.S.-based liaisons to Haitian orphanages, Diana Boni has been frantically alerting every humanitarian aid group she can think of to the plight of the orphanage she works with, BRESMA in Port-au-Prince. The nonprofit group cares for 150 children ranging from babies and toddlers to 13-year-olds.
One of the BRESMA's three concrete-block houses completely collapsed. A second was so badly damaged that the children are sleeping on the lawn outside. The third building emerged intact but is now crammed with the children from the first house.
Directing aid workers to the site is a challenge in a neighborhood that was hard to navigate even before the quake.
"I'm giving directions like, 'Go up the hill on Delmas where the Caribbean market used to be and turn left," said Boni, 39, who lives in South Dakota and is Haiti program coordinator for Kentucky Adoption Services, a nonprofit group.
By Friday afternoon, Boni's voice was hoarse from worry and lack of sleep. One of the houses was provided for, but if help doesn't reach the other soon, she said in a tearful whisper, "I'm out of water tonight."
Then her computer chirped with an e-mail arrival. "It looks like a CNN crew has arrived there!" she exclaimed. "I hope they've brought water."
For prospective parents in the United States, the wait for news has been equally excruciating.
Andrea Vanderhoff of Pella, Iowa, was thrilled to hear from an ABC news crew that a boy and his sister she has been waiting to adopt through the Central Texas Orphan Mission Alliance were safe. But "once that ABC crew leaves, there's going to be no one there," she said fretfully. "These are orphans. They have no one."
During the two years that Vanderhoff and her husband have been waiting for the adoption paperwork to go through, they have visited the children multiple times. "They are already calling us Mama and Papa," she said. "If we need to fly there to get them, I would do it today, but right now it doesn't sound like they would let us in."
In an effort to better coordinate relief efforts, the Joint Council on International Children's Services has started a database of orphanages and known orphans on its Web site, http://www.jcics.org.
The group hopes the list will eventually help it expedite moving the orphans to the United States and Europe. The easier cases are ones in which adoptions were already approved by Haitian authorities and the children were awaiting a U.S. or European visa. More complicated is the situation of children who were matched with a family but whose adoption had not been certified.
In an e-mail, Department of Homeland Security spokesman Matthew Chandler said, "We understand the deep concern these prospective adoptive parents feel about the welfare of these children, and we are actively working to identify available options in light of the recent tragedy."
Staff writer Tara Bahrampour contributed to this report.
When Benjamin Feshbach was 11 years old, he was given a brainteaser: Which day would the vice president’s birthday fall on the next year?
Benjamin, now 13, said he typed the question directly into the Google search box, to no avail. He then tried Wikipedia, Yahoo, AOL and Ask.com, also without success. “Later someone told me it was a multistep question,” said Benjamin, a seventh grader from North Potomac, Md.
“Now it seems quite obvious because I’m older,” he said. “But, eventually, I gave up. I didn’t think the answer was important enough to be on Google.” Benjamin is one of 83 children, ages 7, 9 and 11, who participated in a study on children and keyword searching. Sponsored by Google and developed by the University of Maryland and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, the research was aimed at discerning the differences between how children and adults search and identify the barriers children face when trying to retrieve information.
Like other children, Benjamin was frustrated by his lack of search skills or, depending on your view, the limits of search engines.
When considering children, search engines had long focused on filtering out explicit material from results. But now, because increasing numbers of children are using search as a starting point for homework, exploration or entertainment, more engineers are looking to children for guidance on how to improve their tools.
Search engines are typically developed to be easy for everyone to use. Google, for example, uses the Arial typeface because it considers it more legible than other typefaces. But advocates for children and researchers say that more can be done technologically to make it easier for young people to retrieve information. What is at stake, they say, are the means to succeed in a new digital age.
“We’re giving them a tool that was made for adults,” said Michael H. Levine, executive director of the Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, a nonprofit research center in New York focused on digital education for children. Allison Druin, director of the human-computer interaction lab at the University of Maryland, suggested expanding the concept of keywords. Instead of typing a word into a search box, children could click on an image or video, which would turn up results.
Ms. Druin said that parents played a big role in helping children search. She proposed that search engines imitate that role by adding technology aids, like prominent suggestions for related content or an automated chat system, to help children when they get stuck.
Children’s choices of search engines differ only slightly from the preferences of adults. Google ranks most popular among children, followed by Yahoo, Google Image search, Microsoft’s Bing and Ask.com, according to the research firm Nielsen. (Among adults, Bing is ahead of Google Image.)
Irene Au, Google’s director of user experience, said that rather than develop a specific product for children, her team used research findings to inform how it could improve search for all ages. “The problems that kids have with search are probably the problems adults experience, just magnified,” Ms. Au said. “It’s helped highlight the areas we need to focus on.”
For example, Google has long known that it can be difficult for users to formulate the right keywords to call up their desired results. But that task can be even more challenging for children, given that they do not always have the right context for thinking about a new subject. One 12-year-old boy searching for information about Costa Rica used the search term “sweaty clothes” because that was what he associated with the jungle.
“If we can solve that for children we can solve that for adults,” Ms. Au said.
One way Google aims to overcome that problem is by showing related searches. Ms. Au said Google had tried various placements since related searches were introduced in 2007 and had found that it could be helpful to introduce such queries — or other content like video, images or news — at the bottom of the page.
A search on the word dolphins, for example, shows a set of related searches, (sharks, bottlenose dolphins) and two YouTube videos of dolphins at play. Ms. Druin called the bottom of the screen “valuable territory” because children often focus on their hands and the keyboard when they search and see that space first when they glance up.
Stefan Weitz, director of Bing, said that for certain types of tasks, like finding a list of American presidents, people found answers 28 percent faster with a search of images rather than of text. He said that because Bing used more imagery than other search engines, it attracted more children. Microsoft says Bing’s audience of 2- to 17-year-olds has grown 76 percent since May. “My daughter who’s 5, her typing skills aren’t great, but she can browse images of various dog breeds through visual search,” Mr. Weitz said.
In May, Google introduced Wonder Wheel, a graphical search tool aimed at making browsing easier. (To find it, click on “show options” on a page of search results; it appears halfway down the left column.) For a search on “apple,” the wheel shows prongs pointing to “apple fruit” or “apple store locator” in the left panel.
Children also tend to want to ask questions like “Who is the president?” rather than type in a keyword. Scott Kim, chief technology officer at Ask.com, said that because as many as a third of search queries were entered as questions (up to 43 percent on Ask Kids, a variant designed for children), it had enlarged search boxes on both sites by almost 30 percent.
In September, Google also increased the length of its search box and the size of its font for related searches. Google said the change was meant to enhance ease of use for everyone.
Future trends in search may also be helpful to children. The move toward voice-activated search like the Google voice search on iPhones and Android phones and audio and video search will prove beneficial to children with limited abilities, experts say.
Benjamin Feshbach, who’s now considered a power searcher, has his own ideas.
“I think there should be a program where Google asks kids questions about what they’re searching for,” he said, “like a Google robot.”
SAN'A, Yemen | Thirteen-year-old Sally al-Sabahi stood outside the courthouse earlier this month fiddling with her smudged, half-polished nails. She was hoping to get a divorce, but her husband did not show up.
When Sally was 11, her father married her to 23-year-old Nabil al-Mushahi, a cousin. Since the wedding, she has run away from her husband's home three times.
"I was afraid of him since the first day," she said in her parents' tiny, windowless, stone home after the failed court date. "I don't want to get married again until after I am dead."
Sally said she wants a divorce because her husband beat, berated and regularly attempted to rape her. When asked whether he succeeded in the sexual assaults, her long eyelashes lowered toward the floor against her black veil, and she picked at the faded orange and green sheet she was sitting on. She did not answer.
Arranged marriages for girls as young as 9 are common in many parts of Yemen. About half the women in the country are married before they are 18, according to Ahmed al-Quareshi, the head of the Seyaj Organization for the Protection of Children.
The Yemeni parliament has been debating for almost a year a law that would make 17 the minimum age for marriage, but the measure is fiercely contested and has been blocked by hard-line religious leaders.
"It's a part of their social structure," Mr. al-Quareshi said. "It's a tradition to allow marriage at an early age."
Early marriages are especially common in the countryside, where more than 70 percent of Yemen's 22 million people live, said Shada Nasser, a lawyer and children's rights advocate. Rural mothers, often illiterate and former child brides themselves, don't consider bucking the system, she said.
The young brides, robbed of childhood and education, grow up afraid of their husbands and resenting their children.
"They had dreams," Ms. Nasser said, "But early marriage broke those dreams."
As Yemen - the poorest country in the Arab world - seems to grow poorer every year, the child-bride population is growing fast, according to Ms. Nasser. Parents look for husbands for their little girls so they will have fewer mouths to feed.
Money paid by husbands to their brides' families is also an important source of income. Almost half of Yemenis live on less than $2 a day, according to the United Nations.
Before marriage, many future husbands promise the girls' families that they will not have sex with their brides until the girls are mature, which is generally considered to be about 15 years old. About 10 percent to 20 percent of the new husbands break that promise, according to Ms. Nasser.
It is not just poor families that marry their daughters before puberty, according to Naseem ur-Rehman, a spokesman for the U.N. children's agency, UNICEF. "It cuts across social and economic variations," he said.
Sometimes, he said, children are married to strengthen tribal relationships.
The early marriages often have dire consequences.
Women who give birth before they are 18 are almost eight times as likely to die in labor than those who give birth in their 20s, Mr. ur-Rehman said. In some parts of Yemen, women are about 60 times more likely to die in childbirth than in the United States.
Fawziya Youssef was 12 when she died in early September, according to Mr. al-Quareshi. Fawziya and her husband, 26, had been married for only a year.
Fawziya died of severe bleeding while delivering a stillborn baby after three days of painful labor. Her parents, however, do not think she died because she was married too young, said Mr. al-Quareshi. In their village in the Hoedeida governorate, it is the custom to marry girls before they are 13.
Fawziya's parents are heartbroken, but have no recourse.
"There are no laws saying that this is a crime," Mr. al-Quareshi said.
In February, a bill that would set a minimum marriage age was put to a vote in parliament. It passed 17 to 13, according to Fouad Dahabahi, a legislator. But before the president could sign it, it was blocked. A prominent sheik and several other Muslim religious leaders had objected, saying it contradicted Islamic law, which allows girls to be married at age 9.
Although most members of parliament disagreed with the sheik privately, according to Mr. Dahabahi they were worried about appearing un-Islamic. They sent the bill to be re-examined by committees on health, the constitution, Islamic law and human rights.
Mr. Dahabahi said he supported the bill because when he was 19, he was married to a 13-year-old girl named Intisar.
Soon after they were married, she became pregnant. She got very sick, and her frail health and misery haunted the family for years. "She was a child when she was a mother," he said.
The bill, he said, is also delayed because parliament members prefer not to argue publicly about such a controversial issue. And, as in many bodies in the Yemeni government, parliament has trouble getting things done because it is in session only five months a year.
Other lawmakers said they oppose the law because setting a specific age for marriage is an unnecessary bow to Western culture.
"Why do we have follow [Western] traditions?" asked parliament member Mohammad al-Hamzi. "God created the girl, and knows when she is ready."
Mr. al-Hamzi said that girls who marry before puberty should not, and normally do not, have sex with their husbands. But, he added, "If something bad happens to her, she has the right to go to the judge and ask for a divorce, like Nujood."
Last year, 10-year-old Nujood Ali went to court alone to seek freedom from an abusive husband. She sued for divorce against her father's will. She won because a sympathetic judge believed that her husband had raped her.
Nujood's case made news around the world and inspired parliament to consider a minimum legal age for marriage. But when she tried to register for school, Nujood was initially refused because she had been exposed to sex. The teacher said she could taint the other children, according to Ms. Nasser, who also represented Nujood.
When Nujood heard about Sally's bid for freedom, she pledged to give her $500 out of royalties from a biography being published about her. That is half the money Sally will need to repay her husband if she is granted a divorce.
Even though the judge believed that Nujood had been raped, she still had to give her ex-husband $200.
To get a divorce, Sally must produce written proof and a witness to the abuse.
A few weeks ago, during an Islamic holiday, Mr. al-Mushahi came to Sally's family home. The roof of the house is a blue plastic tarp, and household water is lugged inside in dirty yellow jerrycans. Sally said she wanted to stay with her family. Her parents begged her to go back to her husband.
For three days, Sally refused to eat, and threatened to kill herself. Her parents relented, and told Mr. al-Mushahi it was over.
"As I told you before, I tried to convince her, but she doesn't want you anymore," Sally's father, Mubkhoot Ahmed, barked into his cell phone at his son-in-law after he failed to appear in court.
Mr. Ahmed blamed himself for marrying off his daughter too young and for believing that Mr. al-Mushahi would not touch her before she was ready.
Sally said that when she was 11, she knew nothing about marriage, but agreed to the match because she would be lavished with gifts for the first time in her life. Her father supports his wife and five children by selling ground chili powder in the market. Sometimes he makes $2.50 a day. Sometimes he makes nothing.
"I was thinking only about jewelry and clothes," said Sally, slapping her hands together.
Her father said he was afraid that Mr. al-Mushahi would be embarrassed that Sally abandoned him, and try to take his daughter by force.
In a country with little government control outside the capital, he said he is prepared to protect his family the old-fashioned way.
If your ex-spouse has run off and taken your children abroad, and the international legal system is failing to bring them back, what are you to do? One option is to call Gus Zamora, a former Army ranger who will, for a hefty fee, get your children back. Operating in a moral gray area beyond the reach of any clear-cut legal jurisdiction, Zamora claims to have returned 54 children to left-behind parents. Here’s the story of number 55.
A sound recording of the moment that became this story’s climax
On a humid Thursday afternoon in February, I am riding in a rented van in Central America with a man who abducts children for a living. The van’s windows are tinted, and Gustavo Zamora Jr. is speeding east on a two-lane highway toward Siquirres, a town buried in the lush abundance of eastern Costa Rica. Gus is planning to snatch Andres, a 9-year-old American boy who has been claimed by too many parents. Sitting behind me is one of them: Todd Hopson, a 48-year-old lawyer from Ocala, Florida, who considers himself the boy’s father, by rights of love and U.S. law. Ahead of me in the front passenger seat is Gus’s 22-year-old son and partner, Gustavo Zamora III.
Even by the standards of this American age of divorce, when byzantine custody arrangements are commonplace, Andres’s situation is complex. His biological mother, Helen Zapata, who is from Costa Rica but now lives in America, was married to Todd Hopson for just under three years. Now they are divorced—but they continue to share custody of Andres and, until recently, lived together in Florida. Todd never formally adopted Andres, but he and Helen got an official document in Florida in June of 2008 acknowledging Todd’s legal paternity. They also asked a Florida court to declare Andres “born of their marriage,” a request that was granted the following September and applied retroactively to 2004, the year they divorced.
“I got to thinking—what if something happens to me, and Andres has Helen’s last name? Andres wouldn’t be entitled to any rights or benefits,” Todd told me. “I’m a lawyer and should have been thinking about those things earlier, but I didn’t.”
At the end of June 2008, Helen flew to Costa Rica to spend time there and, with Todd’s support, to enroll in a drug clinic to kick a cocaine habit. Every year, Helen and Andres traveled to Costa Rica to visit not only Helen’s relatives, but also those of Jason Alvarado, who is Andres’s biological father. So that June, as usual, Andres went along, though he didn't want to go—he didn't want to miss Little League season in Ocala, for one thing. Before Helen left the U.S., she called Jason in Costa Rica, asking if he would look after Andres for a few days and saying that she planned to go job-hunting in Costa Rica so that she could move there permanently. “I lied to him” to hide the drug problem, Helen concedes. When Jason learned Helen’s true whereabouts, he called Todd in Florida, thanking him for everything he’d done for Andres and telling him, Todd says, that he planned to raise the boy himself.
Todd felt blindsided. He had thought Andres would be visiting with Helen’s mother and told me he had “no idea that Jason had any interest” in having custody of Andres. As Todd saw it, Jason had never previously tried to gain custody or in any way contributed to Andres’s care. “If you’re going to be the father,” Todd says, “you don’t let someone else pay the freight.”
The Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction was drafted in 1980 to resolve custodial claims between what are known as the “taking parent” and the “left-behind parent.” To date, 81 nations, including the United States, in 1988, have agreed to the treaty. The State Department, which enforces the treaty in the U.S., currently has more than 2,000 active cases involving nearly 3,000 children abducted from the U.S. or wrongfully retained abroad. In 2008, it opened 1,082 new files, an increase of more than 25 percent over 2007. (The increase reflects a rise in transnational marriages, and consequently transnational divorces, as well as growing awareness of the Hague Convention.)
Todd considered filing a Hague application with the State Department, but he was skeptical that it would amount to anything because he distrusted what he dismissed as the corrupt legal system in Costa Rica. The application, he feared, could take months to process. He wavered between feelings of fury and utter helplessness. “It breaks my heart,” he said to me. “I don’t have any control.” Determined to regain some, he surfed the Internet for security agencies in Costa Rica, thinking, “I’ll hire some bodyguards and just take Andres.” A man Todd spoke to at one agency said he didn’t do child recoveries but could recommend someone who did: Gus Zamora. “That’s all he does,” the man said.
Gus, a former U.S. soldier, has dyed brown hair and a tidy moustache. He wears Oakley sunglasses and a gold necklace with a pendant shaped like a diver. A martial-arts tattoo adorns the back of his left hand. In Gus’s mind, he’s never stopped being a soldier. In Tampa, his home, he drives a royal-blue BMW with the license plate ABN RGR, referring, respectively, to his time as a member of the 101st Airborne Division and as an Army ranger. When on assignment, like on this scouting mission through eastern Costa Rica, he talks about conducting “recon” and moving his “assets.” His dark eyes flit from side to side, taking stock of his surroundings, and he rarely stops talking, dispensing instructions, expletives, and commentary about his travels to 64 countries and counting.
As Gus continues to drive east, evaluating prospective switch points, we pass pineapple fields before turning left off Highway 32 toward Siquirres. In a minute or so, we are at the town square, a stretch of grass dominated by soccer goalposts. Gus points to a bench where he says a bus picks up Andres for school each day.
Musing aloud, Gus runs through potential scenarios. Where’s the best spot to grab Andres? At the bus stop, on his way to school? A possibility, but Jason or Jason’s father sometimes waits with the boy there. At the school itself? Maybe, depending on how far it is from Highway 32. During one of Helen’s supervised visits with Andres at the home of Jason’s parents?
Across the street from the square is a yellow house with a black iron gate. Todd identifies it as the home of Andres’s paternal grandparents, where Helen has her custodial visits. Gus likes what he sees; Helen could walk through the gate with Andres to the waiting SUV. “They could come and get in,” Gus says. “This is a straight shot. The highway’s right up here,” allowing a quick getaway.
“It’s a very short route,” Todd agrees.
“I like that a lot better. She can walk out the door,” Gus says. “She walks down the street, gets in the van. Boom, gone …”
When Todd returned to the U.S., he talked to Helen by phone and exchanged letters with her; a friend of Helen’s acted as interpreter. Todd invited Helen to Florida. When she told him she was pregnant, he said he had already suspected that, and reiterated his invitation. Bringing along the friend as a translator, Helen flew to Florida and moved in with Todd. (The translator left after a couple of weeks, and Helen now speaks English.)
Two months later, Helen’s appendix burst, and she was hospitalized in Ocala. The next day, September 6, 1999, she gave birth to a boy. Todd held the infant before Helen did, marveling at his shock of black hair. When Andres left the hospital, a week before his mother did, Todd cared for him. Todd also paid the hospital bills, which came to $25,000, and financially supported Andres from then on.
Shortly after giving birth, Helen called Jason to tell him he had a son. Jason wanted to make sure that the boy was his, so he asked Helen to send him blood samples, which she did. Jason sent the samples to a laboratory in Costa Rica, and when the test confirmed that he was the father, he wanted to acknowledge his son legally.
When Andres was a year old, Jason flew to Ocala to get a copy of the birth certificate, which named no father. Even though she hadn’t intended to cooperate, Helen helped Jason obtain it, and invited him home, where he visited with her, Andres, and Todd. Jason then registered his paternity with the Costa Rican consulate in Miami, but he didn’t pursue custody, because, he told me, he was willing to allow Andres to live with his mother. In 2001, Helen married Todd.
Meanwhile, Todd bonded with Andres. As a toddler, Andres would cry and chase the car when Todd went to work. When Andres grew older, Todd helped him with his homework and shuttled him to and from school. When Andres developed a fascination with baseball, Todd nurtured it, taking him to batting cages, hiring a private coach, and cheering him on at games. In 2008, they attended spring training for the Yankees, where Andres was thrilled to be within 15 feet of his favorite player, Alex Rodriguez.
Meanwhile, Helen chafed at the quietness of Ocala, escaping to Orlando for days at a time. She liked to throw on tight jeans and high heels and revel in the attention she attracted. Soon, she was seeking out more dangerous highs.
“I’ve been 100 percent the father and, over the last year, maybe 80 percent the mother,” Todd told me.
“Andres trusts Todd more than he trusts me,” Helen says.
In July of 2008, Todd says, Andres called him from Costa Rica in tears. Andres said he wanted to go home and asked, “Daddy, would you come and get me?” Todd counseled him to be patient, promising that he would come to bring him home soon.
Todd Hopson does not come across as the sort of person who would hire a kidnapper. His idea of excitement is watching Seinfeld reruns. He is quick with a one-liner if conversation flags. He clears his throat repeatedly, a nervous tic that may be related to his fondness for cigars. During most of our time in Costa Rica, he wore the same outfit—a khaki shirt with lots of pockets, jeans, and bright-white sneakers. But while Hopson may seem like a softie, his resolve is strong: he would rather break the laws of Costa Rica than his word to Andres.
In late August, even before Todd filed a Hague application, he contacted Gus Zamora, who was feeling the pinch of the recession. It had been nine months since his last recovery. “If somebody asked me to find his dog or cat on a roof, I’d do it,” he joked. Gus offered to do the job for $25,000, including expenses—about a third of his usual rate. Still, Todd had to borrow money against his house to pay the fee. Gus planned to take two trips to do the recovery, and Todd agreed to pay him $10,000 before the first and $15,000 before the second.
In September, Gus flew from Tampa to Costa Rica to rendezvous with Helen and do reconnaissance in Siquirres. From the start, Helen resisted doing a recovery; she didn’t want to break any laws and possibly jeopardize her ability to return to Costa Rica. Todd felt he needed her cooperation, however, because she had access to Andres—and Andres’s passport had her last name on it. (A child traveling with adults without the same last name might raise suspicion.) At Todd’s insistence, Helen agreed to meet with Gus.
One day, while doing surveillance with Helen, Gus saw an opportunity to grab Andres. But Helen called him off, deciding instead to rely on the local lawyer she’d hired to regain custody. By February, however, Helen was fed up. She had just returned from a visit with Andres, and she was furious that she could not take him anywhere—not even an ice-cream shop—on her own.
“After I go through all the pain and drama of childbirth, they come and take my son away,” she told me. “Hell, no. I decided, ‘Gus, come here. I’m not waiting for the law, for Jason, for nothing.’”
The assignment seemed straightforward. Helen had access to Andres through her visitation privileges. Todd had assured Gus that Andres wanted to leave Costa Rica. Under these circumstances, how hard could it be to snatch Andres from Jason or from his paternal grandparents, who often cared for him while Jason, the town dentist, was at work? But Gus had learned from the previous recoveries he had conducted—54 of them, by his count—to proceed with caution.
The price of a mistake, after all, could be imprisonment. Agents like Gus risk arrest for kidnapping or related charges if they’re caught. When Gus first started doing child recoveries, in the late ’80s, he worked for a man named Don Feeney, who pioneered the practice through his company, Corporate Training Unlimited, in Fayetteville, North Carolina. In 1993, Feeney was arrested on kidnapping charges for trying to recover two American girls from their mother in Iceland. He served one year in an Icelandic jail.
The risks remain high. In 2006, two agents were arrested in Lebanon for taking two girls from their father. The mother, who had hired the agents, spent seven weeks hiding in Lebanon with the girls because she, too, faced kidnapping charges. Gus says he himself has never served jail time—but a warrant for his arrest, for kidnapping, was issued in Mexico in 1997. (The charges were subsequently dropped.) To reduce the likelihood of his being charged with kidnapping, Gus says, he insists that the parent who hires him be present during a recovery.
A successful snatchback is only the beginning of the journey. Sometimes, the child doesn’t want to go. Early this year, Gus says, an American father agreed to pay him $70,000 to recover his 10-year-old daughter from Japan, assuring him that the girl would acquiesce. Gus went to the Philippines to prepare an escape route by boat. He then flew to Tokyo and, accompanied by the father, hustled the girl into a van as she left home. “That little girl screamed bloody murder,” Gus told me. “She was beating at the windows. Contrary to everything we’d been told, she definitely did not want to go.” After a day of unsuccessfully trying to calm the girl down, he released her. (He says he received half of his fee up front; he wasn’t paid the remainder.) Gus says he would never snatch an unwilling child—though he also describes recoveries in which a resistant child grew more willing over time.
Even if a child wants to go, exiting a country can be challenging, because the forsaken parent will usually report the snatchback to the local authorities. In 2000, George Uhl, a neurologist from Maryland, hired Gus to find and recover his 2-year-old son. The boy was traced to western Hungary, where his mother had left him with her parents. After Gus helped Uhl take the boy, French police intercepted Uhl at Charles de Gaulle airport on his way home. Uhl was released that same day, but his son was returned to the boy’s mother. Gus blames Uhl for failing to follow instructions. He says he told Uhl to pay cash for a direct flight to the United States; Uhl’s mistake was choosing to connect through Paris. At the time, however, there were no direct flights to the U.S. from Venice, where Uhl was dropped off.
In 2007, a woman hired Gus on behalf of her daughter to retrieve her two granddaughters, then 5 and 4, who had allegedly been abused by their father, the daughter’s ex-husband, in Ankara, Turkey. The father had won custody in the Turkish courts and kept the girls’ passports, making it hard for Gus to get the girls out of Europe. Traveling with the grandmother and mother, he got the girls to a neighboring country, but the mother could not get papers from the U.S. Embassy for both girls to travel to the States. The mother and the girls have since gone into hiding. (Names and identifying details have been withheld here because the grandmother and mother’s lawyers say the girls are at risk of more abuse if they are located.) The grandmother blames Gus. “I gave him $86,000, and he left us stranded,” she told me. But Gus says he had set up an exit route for the family through a third European country, adding that the grandmother stiffed him for $25,000.
Gus demands obedience from his clients, and tends to view questioning from them as an affront. Some of his gripes are justified; his clients can be unreliable partners. “The client can be your worst enemy,” he says. “Every now and then you get a perfect client, but unfortunately in this business, you’re dealing with people who are damaged. They’re on their own special shelf.” Custody battles as intractable as the ones that call for Gus’s services rarely involve uncomplicated actors.
Helen raised Gus’s hackles from the start. He didn’t trust her, but he felt he had to work with her because it was she, not Todd, who had access to Andres. While she visited with Andres on the front porch, Helen explained, the grandfather usually went to karate class. That left only the grandmother, who spent a lot of time talking on the phone. It seemed to be a situation from which Andres could be easily extricated.
So as dusk falls on a Friday in February, a day after our initial reconnaissance, I am sitting in the SUV, parked around the corner from the yellow house, while Helen visits with Andres on the porch, waiting for an opportunity to take him and make a break for it. Gus has told her not to try anything unless she has a few minutes when she is completely unobserved. But she is having trouble. In the seat behind me, Gus’s son is reading aloud text messages from Helen. “She still looking,” Helen texts, referring to Andres’s grandmother. “She don’t move.”
A police car passes by. “We’ve been standing in this spot too long,” Gus says. It’s a normal patrol, he adds, but if the car returns, he’s inclined to leave. Then Helen texts: “We can’t do it today.” Gus puts the SUV in gear and drives past the yellow house and a royal-blue Toyota Camry—Jason’s car—parked in front of it.
The following Monday, I am waiting with Gus and Todd in the parking lot of the motel Gus has chosen as the switch point. Inside, the motel has rooms with mirrored ceilings and rainbow-colored wallpaper; the outside is a garish purple. But Gus has been attracted by subtler selling points: it’s only a three-minute drive from the yellow house, and its parking lot is set back from Highway 32, concealed by palm trees. The SUV and the van are parked there, side by side.
Gus is sitting on the back ledge of the van, wearing black cargo pants and a silky gray shirt. Todd is standing nearby, running his hands through his hair, which is slick with sweat. Every few minutes, he takes his cell phone out of his shirt pocket and looks down at it, pushing his glasses up on his nose. When the phone rings at last, Todd jumps. Helen has arrived for her visit, and she has put Andres on the line.
“Hey, Papi, how are you doing?” Todd says, using his nickname for Andres. “You ready to come home soon? What’d you do if you see me? You come running to me, huh?”
Rain starts pouring down, so we take refuge in the van. Gus says the weather reminds him of his days as a ranger in the late 1970s, when one of his instructors, a Vietnam vet, ordered the men to strip off their ponchos in torrential rain. “Men,” Gus says, recalling the sergeant’s instructions, “the best time to catch the enemy with his pants down is when he’s under a poncho, in a defensive situation, with a cup of coffee, feeling sorry for himself. That’s when you should be moving against his position.”
From the porch of the yellow house, Helen texts that the grandfather hasn’t gone to karate. As it becomes clear that, once again, Helen is being too closely observed to initiate the snatchback, Todd grows visibly frustrated and wonders aloud whether one solution might be to slow down “the old man” long enough to keep him from impeding the snatchback. “What if you hire a couple of lowlifes…?”
“It would take me time to fucking do that,” Gus says. For all his tough talk, he doesn’t seem eager to break down doors.
“Okay, okay,” Todd says. “I was just thinking. I don’t mean hurt him, but just to, to delay him, to stall him.”
Gus doesn’t respond. He later tells me that he hasn’t been paid enough for that kind of job.
Breakups know no borders. Lovers from different countries connect, conceive, and in some cases, combust. Their children must weather the aftermath; in the worst cases, they are abducted by a parent and made to live underground. The Hague Permanent Bureau, which collects information about the Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction and advises countries about its implementation, does not keep comprehensive global statistics on this phenomenon. But in 1994, the U.S. State Department’s Office of Children’s Issues, which handles family abduction cases, had four staff members; today, it has 57.
The convention was designed to mediate cross-border tugs-of-war. Any country that has agreed to the treaty promises to respect the custodial decisions of the other contracting countries. The convention’s goal is to secure the “prompt return” of a child who has been “wrongfully removed to or retained in” another contracting country. The convention specifically defines prompt: a judge or administrator in the country where the child is being held is supposed to render a decision within six weeks. The judge is not authorized to make a decision about custody; his job is to determine whether the child should be returned to his “habitual residence” so that the courts in that place can exercise their jurisdiction.
According to the Permanent Bureau’s latest statistics, based on surveys of member nations in 2003, in 68 percent of cases, the parent who initially flees abroad with a child is the mother. After a marital separation, mothers are more likely to have primary custody, and many “taking mothers” cite domestic violence as their reason for running off with their kids. Indeed, the most popular defense against a “prompt return” of a child is Article 13B of the convention—that the child would suffer a “grave risk.” Another common defense is Article 12, which, after a year has elapsed since the abduction or wrongful retention, allows a judge to take into account whether the child has “settled into its new environment.”
“You’ll see this when you look at compliance reports,” says Martha Pacheco, Abduction Unit chief at the Office of Children’s Issues. “The child will not be returned quickly, for whatever reason. A year goes by, two years go by, and then the argument is made by the taking parent that the child has settled in the country and it will be traumatic for the child to go back. It’s not fair—it’s a catch-22.”
The left-behind parent faces tough odds. Many countries, especially in Asia and the Middle East, have not signed the convention. Those countries have a tendency to favor the rights of their nationals, even if they’re the taking parents. Japan has one of the worst records among non-Hague countries. The State Department is handling 73 outstanding cases involving 104 children who have been abducted to or retained in Japan by parents.
The predicament of Walter Benda is typical. In 1995, he was living with his wife of 13 years in her home country of Japan. According to Benda, he wanted to return to the U.S. and she did not. One day, she disappeared with their two daughters. “Please forgive me for leaving you this way,” she wrote in a note she left. The Japanese police, Benda says, would not investigate what they viewed as a family matter; it took him three and a half years to find the girls. He never won visitation rights. “It took a couple of years before the courts even interviewed my children,” he recalls. “By that time, they’d been brainwashed and didn’t want to see their father.”
Sometimes even countries that have agreed to the Hague Convention are no better. For instance, the State Department has more than 500 open cases involving 800 children abducted to or retained in Mexico. The convention has no enforcement mechanism; it’s up to the judicial system of a member nation to make its court’s decision stick. According to the Hague’s own statistics from a 2003 study, only 51 percent of all applications end with the child’s return to the left-behind parent. When the abducting parent does not consent to give up the child, judges take an average of 143 days to order a return—a far cry from the six weeks mandated by the convention. (Costa Rica, which agreed to the convention in 1998, did not respond to the Hague survey, so it is not included in these statistics.)
In addition to pursuing the matter as a civil issue through the convention, a left-behind parent can press authorities to bring criminal charges against the taking parent. This can result in an Interpol “red notice” calling for police to arrest the taking parent, with a view toward extradition. That’s likely what happened last April, when a Russian mother was arrested in Hungary after abducting her daughter in France from her ex-husband, who was badly beaten during the abduction. The mother was extradited to France to face charges of kidnapping and complicity in the assault; she was later freed.
Gus Zamora, for his part, is generally dismissive of what he calls “the Vague Convention.” But he’s seen it work. In 2004, Hal Berger’s then-wife abducted their son from California to South Africa. A year later, he filed a Hague application, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees and eight months in South Africa during the litigation; finally, South Africa’s Supreme Court ordered the boy’s return to the U.S. Berger, his estranged wife, and their son flew back together on the same plane. But 10 months later, she took off with the son again, using fake passports to return to South Africa. Berger went back to the South African courts—but this time he hired Gus, in case the courts ruled against him, or his estranged wife fled a third time. After spending hundreds of thousands more, a night in jail, and more than a month in Africa, Berger won his case in the South African courts in December 2007 and flew home with his son.
More often than not, Gus gets involved when his clients have lost patience with the courts. When parents come to him in desperation, he asks them three questions: Do they have custodial rights? Do they have an idea where their kids are? And can they afford his fee?
One morning in November of 2005, an engineer (who asked that his name and other identifying details not be used here because of pending legal issues) left his home in the Midwest for work, carrying the lunch his wife had packed for him. A few hours later, he picked up a voice mail from her saying that she had taken their 2-year-old daughter shopping and wouldn’t be reachable for a while. Only that evening did he learn that she’d fled to India. The engineer flew to Mumbai, hoping to reconcile. But the marriage seemed irretrievable. On his lawyer’s recommendation, he filed for divorce and custody after he returned to the U.S. in January. Ten months later, the engineer called Gus, who advised him to let the custody issue play out in the courts first. Shortly thereafter, the engineer won a default custody judgment in a court in his home state when his ex-wife didn’t show up to contest it. At the end of 2006, he flew to Mumbai and met Gus. He returned home with his daughter days later. A kidnapping case is still pending against the engineer in Mumbai.
“Don’t drive fast, especially on the wet roads,” Gus counsels Helen, who is standing under the awning of the purple motel, watching the rain pour down. It’s 6a.m. on Tuesday. The parrots are chirping, and the palm trees bend under the weight of the water. “Take your time and get here,” Gus adds. “It’s only a couple of minutes.”
Gus is prepping Helen to snatch Andres at the bus stop. If a stranger like Gus tried to grab the boy, witnesses might intervene, and the police would react immediately. But a mother calling out to her son and inviting him to step into her car might not trigger an alarm. Ordinarily, Gus would ride along in the car with Helen, but he doesn’t trust her. He also has doubts about whether Andres will go with his mother. He has more faith in Todd’s relationship with the boy, so he has decided that Todd should be in the SUV with Helen. Gus and his son will wait in the getaway van at the purple motel, preparing for a run to the Panama border.
Wearing a striped scarf to cover her distinctive auburn curls, Helen drives into Siquirres. Rain lashes the windshield. Schoolkids carrying backpacks walk into the curve of their umbrellas. Hunching low in the middle of the backseat to avoid detection, Todd warns Helen not to drive off the edge of the road, which drops precipitously into a deep gutter.
Helen pulls over alongside a Baptist church. We can see the town square and the bus stop where Andres gets picked up for school, a block away. Cars swoosh by on the slippery road. The windshield wipers swing back and forth. The weather is a problem. The bus stop has no shelter, so whoever drops off Andres is likely to wait with him in the car, to keep the boy dry until the bus arrives.
Todd and Helen are running out of chances. Helen is supposed to have another visitation at the yellow house later today. Todd, Gus, and Gustavo are scheduled to fly back to the United States tomorrow. A solo practitioner, Todd has cleared his court schedule only until the end of the week. And he can’t afford to hire Gus for a third trip.
At 7:00, a white bus stops on the town square. No one boards it. There are no schoolkids at the bus stop. “I don’t see any activity,” Todd says, sighing.
Time passes. The only sounds are the relentless pounding of the rain, the swish of the wipers, and Helen’s occasional sniffs.
Suddenly, Helen sits bolt upright. “That’s Jason. You see?” A blue Camry heads toward us and turns left onto the street perpendicular to ours. She warns Todd to duck down.
“So where’s Andres?” Helen says, perplexed. Why didn’t Jason pull over at the bus stop? Why did he turn onto the side street instead? Could Andres’s bus stop be located on that side street—not by the square, as she had thought? She asks Todd whether she should check out the side street. He encourages her to go.
“I don’t know if we should,” she says, even as she turns the ignition, inching forward and looking from side to side. She turns right, following the route the blue car took.
“Oh, here,” Helen gasps, looking at two boys in identical uniforms—dark-blue polo shirts and khaki pants—standing along the side of the road. She puts down the passenger-side window, shouting: “Come, Andres! Ven, Andres!”
The shorter and slimmer of the two boys, who has close-cropped hair and a light scar on his brow, stares at her. His brown eyes widen, and he steps forward slightly. Then he looks at the other boy, looks back at Helen, and shakes his head.
“He says no,” Helen says, putting up the window.
“Did Chino see me?” Todd asks, referring to Andres’s companion, who is his uncle. Helen says yes. Todd tells Helen to get out of the car and get Andres.
“He doesn’t want me to,” she says.
“Go out and get him, Helen,” Todd says, his voice rising in frustration. “Just go out and get him.” Helen drives on. Todd moves aggressively into the space between the front seats, directing Helen to do a U-turn and return to Andres. She obeys, warning Todd that Andres’s bus is coming.
“I don’t care, because we’re made. Let’s go,” Todd shouts. “I’m going to get him. Just go!” Helen sniffs, and Todd orders her to stop the SUV. He leaps out and goes to Andres, who is wearing an olive-green backpack.
“Let’s go,” he says, touching Andres’s shoulder. “Come on, buddy!”
Helen adds her encouragement from the driver’s seat. “Come, Andres!”
Andres hesitates, glances at Chino, and then walks quickly to the open door of the SUV. Todd throws himself into the SUV behind Andres and slams the door. “Go!” he shouts.
Helen hits the accelerator.
“Hi, buddy,” Todd says to Andres, hugging him. “How are you, sweetie?”
“Hi,” Andres mutters. He’s clearly unnerved.
“Don’t worry, Papi,” Todd assures him. “It’s going to be okay.”
In the rearview mirror, Helen can see Chino running toward the yellow house. Todd tells her to focus on the road. “Nice and easy,” he says. But Helen careens around the corner, narrowly missing an old man on a bicycle as she swerves to avoid an oncoming bus. As she drives, she keeps asking Andres why he refused to come to her. “He’s scared,” Todd says. (Click here for an audio recording and full transcript of the scene at the bus stop.)
Helen turns onto Highway 32, smack into a long line of traffic. Todd kisses Andres. “Who’s following us?” Andres asks. Helen keeps glancing behind us, worried that Jason will be there. As the SUV creeps forward in the traffic, she pounds the heel of her right hand on the steering wheel, shouting at the cars. “They need to move!”
“It’s okay, it’s okay, buddy,” Todd keeps saying to Andres, who sits rigidly, staring out of eyes that seem to have lost their ability to blink. “That car just happened to be behind us. I don’t think they were following us.”
The palm trees in front of the purple motel come into view, and Helen turns sharply to the right before veering left and screeching to a halt. Gus and his son are waiting in the van, eyebrows raised.
Helen, Todd, Andres, and I jump out of the SUV. Gustavo hustles us into the van.
“Let’s go,” Gus shouts from the driver’s seat.
Helen remembers that she’s left the keys in the SUV.
“Leave ’em,” Gus barks. “Everybody duck down—you especially,” looking at Helen. “Your big head has got to duck down. Don’t worry about anything. Just stay down until we get a safe distance away.”
Gus roars out of the parking lot and turns left onto the highway, heading east. A blue Camry speeds past us in the opposite direction.
At Gus Zamora’s home in Tampa are two huge black safes containing dozens of machine guns, pistols, and rifles—enough artillery, he explains, to outfit a SWAT team of 10 men. (Gus also trains bodyguards.) Inside his office, the shelves are crammed with textbooks like Shooter’s Bible and The Gun Parts. The closet is jammed with model airplanes and shooting trophies. On the walls are pictures and statues of bald eagles; a clock with a camouflage pattern on its face and bullets arrayed around its circumference; certificates attesting to esoteric skills, including one from the “Methods of Entry School” for a course in “surreptitious entry techniques”; newspaper clippings with photos of beaming families; and a handwritten letter from a third-grader in Texas. “Dear Gus,” the girl writes, “I remember you, and I hope I can see you sometime.”
Born in Gary, Indiana, in 1955, Gus joined the Army in 1977, and served in the 1st Ranger Battalion, an elite infantry unit; a rapid-deployment force based in Vicenza, Italy; and the 101st Airborne Division. He met his wife, Vicki, in the service and left the Army in 1984 to prepare, he says, for the birth of their first child. He received an honorable discharge and started working for a series of private security companies. After a stint with a company based in Brownsville, Texas, Gus landed in northern Costa Rica, working on a report about the Contras in Nicaragua for the U.S. Council for World Freedom. Gus stayed in the area, providing protection for John Hull, an American rancher who helped the CIA deliver aid and weapons to the Contras. (A Senate subcommittee later collected evidence that Hull had been engaged in drug trafficking; he was also indicted for murder in Costa Rica. “What’s a little murder when you’re overthrowing a government?,” Gus says. “That’s part of the process.”) Gus then made his way to Don Feeney’s company, Corporate Training Unlimited, in the late ’80s. Feeney’s first recovery case, involving the rescue of a 7-year-old girl who’d been taken to Jordan by her father in 1988, had touched off an international incident; the State Department ended up expressing regret to Jordan. Gus, who speaks Spanish fluently, covered Latin American operations for Feeney.
After spending time in that Icelandic jail in 1993, Feeney cooled on the child-recovery business. But Gus was hooked. “I remember calling Gus and saying, ‘I’ve got a case. There’s almost no money in it, but I believe the child is in real danger,’” Feeney recalled when I spoke to him recently. “Thirty minutes later, he was at the front door of the office, saying, ‘When do we leave?’”
Gus thrives on the feeling that he’s doing good while having fun. He embraces the travel with the gusto of a tourist, collecting information about a well-placed bar, a cozy Italian restaurant, the best hotel Jacuzzi. When he has to plan an escape route over water, he’ll often go scuba diving for a few days while he makes contacts. Despite his specialized military skills, his real expertise seems to be the ability to network—and to talk his way out of a predicament. He’s more fixer than commando.
Gus is paid to take on risk. But his critics say that he also exposes others to danger. When I asked Feeney whether anyone was harmed during his or Gus’s recoveries, he responded, “No. I’m not going to tell you that nobody ever got smacked around a bit. But by the time we were gone on the plane, they got up and dusted themselves off.” The people guarding the child are not the only ones in jeopardy. If an operation goes wrong, a reclaiming parent risks not only jeopardizing any legal case, but also arrest or physical injury. Even worse, a child may be harmed. (Critics of Gus’s line of work often cite this risk, but I haven’t heard of a case where a child was actually physically hurt.)
Even if a recovery proceeds safely, a child may be traumatized. “One of the most psychologically devastating aspects of family abduction is the sudden, unexpected rupture,” Liss Haviv, the executive director of Take Root, an organization composed of formerly abducted children, explained to me recently. “Being recovered may produce the same result. Whether your situation ultimately improves or not, you learn once again that any- and everything can change in the blink of an eye. How do you trust after that?”
Gus insists that no one has been physically harmed during his recoveries. But military-style operations may result in casualties; that’s what may have happened in 2000, when Gus and George Uhl picked up Uhl’s 2-year-old son in western Hungary. Uhl’s ex-wife, Katharina Gotzler, had left the child there with her parents. Gus and Uhl went to the grandparents’ home to retrieve the boy. What came next is contested.
Gus says he waited in the getaway car while Uhl, an American associate, and two Hungarian “assets” went inside to snatch the boy. (When I spoke recently to Gus’s assistant on the job, she did not corroborate that Gus was in the car during the recovery, saying she could not recall the specific events.)
Gotzler was in Munich at the time. When she didn’t hear from her father that night, she called the neighbors and asked them to check on him, according to her attorney, Donald Cramer. The neighbors found the boy gone, and the grandfather dead.
A German court found that Uhl “had the son abducted with the assistance of armed kidnappers. In the course of this abduction, the grandfather came to his death.” Cramer added, “Zamora’s belongings were checked at the hotel—he had Tasers, weapons of all sorts, and ropes.”
According to Gus, one of the Hungarian men had told him the grandfather smoked a cigarette during the recovery, worrying that he’d be blamed for not protecting the boy. “We had somebody check the phone records from that apartment,” Gus says. “The grandfather called his daughter in Germany. She called him back several times, and when she arrived, he was already on the couch dead. We believe that she literally tore him apart on the phone and stressed him out so much that he had a heart attack and died.” Gus says the autopsy reported that the cause of death was natural and that the estimated time of death was four hours after the abduction. Prosecutors in Hungary did not press charges.
Uhl has not seen his son since he was stopped at the Paris airport on his way home. (He declined to be interviewed for this article.)
The day after the snatchback in Siquirres, Diario Extra, a popular tabloid in Costa Rica, reports that while Andres was waiting for the bus, a white Toyota SUV stopped, and two women and a man “violently grabbed” him. The newspaper lists Helen, an aunt, and a U.S. national named “Hotson” as suspects. The article includes a photo of Andres and instructs anyone who spots him to call the police. Jason’s wife is quoted: “We are confident, given that only a few hours have gone by, that they would not be able to take him out of the country.”
But while the police search for Andres in a white Toyota SUV, we are speeding toward Panama in a beige Dodge Caravan. Andres and Helen lie against each other in the backseat, and Todd is prone against the side door. Gus is at the wheel.
“Andres looks good,” Todd says. “That was some shock and awe.”
After nearly an hour, Gus has fought his way through traffic to the turnoff to Limón. Except for some overhanging palm trees and piles of trash, the road is clear. At Gus’s say-so, we sit up. Helen pulls off Andres’s dark-blue shirt so he can exchange it for a white T-shirt that says Cornerstone Middle School.
“You want to go home, right?” Todd says.
Andres nods.
“You remember, I promised,” Todd says. “Did you think Daddy wasn’t going to come for you?”
Andres shakes his head.
Todd tells Andres that he’s left his room exactly the same and that a package has arrived all the way from Japan for him—a customized baseball glove.
“Your hair looks great, buddy,” Todd says, kissing him and observing that he’s grown a little Mohawk. Gus’s son informs Todd that the correct term is faux-hawk.
Andres takes care with his appearance; he is a handsome boy who looks like a miniature version of his favorite Yankee, A-Rod. He tells Todd that he’s started using a hair gel called Gorilla Snot. Later, he asks if he’ll be able to buy the gel in Florida. Throughout the journey, Andres says little, but he seems most concerned about having “forgotten” things—like the hair gel, his clothing, his iPod charger, his NintendoDS, and, most important, two of his baseball gloves. He had taken them with him to Costa Rica, even though he didn’t play much baseball in Siquirres.
As “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” plays on the radio in the background and the ocean crests by the side of the road, Todd tells Andres, “I was so angry when I came down and they wouldn’t let me have you.”
Andres says nothing. But he smiles a few minutes later when Todd cracks a joke about the snatchback, saying: “I was going to tell you, ‘Come with me if you want to live.’”
Gus drives past dilapidated shacks with corrugated-iron roofs, huddles of thin brown cows, and fields of banana plants, their bunches of fruit cradled in bright-blue plastic bags. After an hour, we arrive at Sixaola, a town that shares a narrow river with Panama and lies in the shadow of a border crossing. Trucks idle on a graffiti-covered concrete overpass that runs through the town. Gus’s plan is to get Todd and his family to Panama without passing through an official border stop. Presenting them to immigration officials in Costa Rica at this point is too risky.
Gus frets about finding his contact, a Nicaraguan who owns a motorboat in Sixaola. Luckily, “the Nica,” as Gus calls him, is at his home—a rickety contraption consisting of sheets of iron on a wooden base. The Nicaraguan goes off to fetch the boat. While we wait, Gus reverses the van, rocking it back and forth on the edge of an embankment, which is littered with rotting banana peels and tin cans. Finally, he manages to squeeze the van next to a pigpen in the backyard of the man’s home.
Andres gets out of the van. He plays with a purple band on his wrist and fingers his faux-hawk until a blue boat pulls up to the embankment. He steps into the rocking boat. The engine sputters to life. Minutes later, the captain hops onto Panamanian soil and ties the boat to a banana plant. Todd, Andres, and Helen walk across a stretch of swamp and step into a black pickup with tinted windows that Gus has arranged to have waiting for them.
It’s time for the Little League play-offs between the Red Sox and the Bulls at the Ocala Rotary Sportsplex. Andres—HOPSON displayed on the back of his dark-blue shirt—stands on the first-base line next to his teammates, listening to “The Star-Spangled Banner” with his hat over his heart. The music stops, and Andres’s coach shouts, “All right, gentlemen, let’s go out there and throw some balls!” Soon, Andres is up at bat. He goes down in the count, two strikes against him. He stares through his mirrored sunglasses at the pitcher, a scrawny boy with a mean right arm, and swings at the next ball. The bat connects and he races to first, sliding in safe.
It’s as if Andres never left Ocala. He wakes up every day at 7:10 a.m., takes a shower, and has a bowl of Lucky Charms. Then Todd drives him to the Cornerstone School, a private school with banners along its halls promoting Mutual Respect and Appreciation—No Put Downs. Miss Candice, his third-grade teacher, says she has observed no ill effects from his absence. He does his assignments on time, and he is the Four Square star of the playground. Todd’s relationship with Helen broke down, however, not long after their return, and he asked her to move out.
Todd considered taking Andres to a psychologist, but he decided against it because the boy seemed fine. In response to my direct questions, Andres says that the Alvarados treated him well but that he doesn’t miss anything about Costa Rica. He didn’t play baseball in Siquirres. It’s “funner” in Ocala, where he plays baseball three times a week. He says he knew his dad would come for him. Andres doesn’t like to talk about Costa Rica. If anyone asks where he was, he told Todd upon his return, “I’m going to say it’s a long story.”
But as Jason Alvarado sees it, the story is simple. Helen Zapata and Todd Hopson kidnapped Andres. Andres, he says, had been adjusting well to Siquirres; he had even been president of his class. Jason says he doesn’t want to appear ungrateful to Hopson for raising Andres. Still, he believes Andres’s care should be a matter between him and the boy’s mother. “Now that his mother seems not to be able to take care of him, I don’t see why he has to stay” in the U.S., Jason says. “They have always known I’m the father. I have always been there for him emotionally and economically.” Todd, for his part, says that Jason never spent “one centavo” on Andres’s care; Jason counters that he sent money to Helen.
In theory, the U.S. State Department agrees with Jason’s view. “We cannot condone the violation of the law of another sovereign territory,” a State Department spokesperson says of private recovery attempts. Yet when Todd informed the State Department that he had, with Gus Zamora’s help, recovered Andres, the woman helping with his Hague application responded by e-mail, “We all breathed a collective sigh of relief on hearing that Andres and Helen are back home in Florida with you.” She went on to explain that Costa Rica had “a steep learning curve” about the convention, and said of Hopson’s application, “We frankly do not know how it might have worked in your case.”
Jason is giving them another chance to find out: in late May, he filed his own Hague application, requesting his son’s prompt return.
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