IXTEPEC, MEXICO -- As the Mexican government condemns a new immigration law in Arizona as cruel and xenophobic, illegal migrants passing through Mexico are routinely robbed, raped and kidnapped by criminal gangs that often work alongside corrupt police, according to human rights advocates.
Immigration experts and Catholic priests who shelter the travelers say that Mexico's strict laws to protect the rights of illegal migrants are often ignored and that undocumented migrants from Central America face a brutal passage through the country. They are stoned by angry villagers, who fear that the Central Americans will bring crime or disease, and are fleeced by hustlers. Mexican police and authorities often demand bribes.
Mexico detained and deported more than 64,000 illegal migrants last year, according to the National Migration Institute. A few years ago, Mexico detained 200,000 undocumented migrants. The lower numbers are the result of tougher enforcement on the U.S. border, the global economic slowdown and, say some experts, the robbery and assaults migrants face in Mexico.
The National Commission on Human Rights, a government agency, estimates that 20,000 migrants are kidnapped each year in Mexico.
While held for ransom, increasingly at the hands of Mexico's powerful drug cartels, many migrants are tortured -- threatened with execution, beaten with bats and submerged in buckets of water or excrement.
"They put a plastic bag over your head and you can't breathe. They tell you if you don't give them the phone numbers" of family members the kidnappers can call to demand payment for a migrant's release, "they say the next time we'll just let you die," said Jose Alirio Luna Moreno, a broad-shouldered young man from El Salvador, interviewed at a shelter in the southern state of Oaxaca.
Luna said he was held for three days this month in Veracruz by the Zeta drug trafficking organization, which demanded $1,000 to set him free. He said he was abducted by men in police uniforms and taken to a safe house with 26 others.
Of the 64,000 migrants detained and expelled by Mexico last year, the Mexican government granted only 20 humanitarian visas, which would have allowed them to stay in Mexico while they testified and pressed charges against their assailants.
"We have a government in Mexico that emphatically criticizes the new immigration law -- which is perfectly valid, to criticize a law with widespread consequences -- but at the same time doesn't have the desire to address the same problem within its own borders," said Alberto Herrera, executive director of Amnesty International in Mexico.
"The violations in human rights that migrants from Central America face in Mexico are far worse than Mexicans receive in the United States," said Jorge Bustamante of the University of Notre Dame and the College of the Border in Tijuana, who has reported on immigration in Mexico for the United Nations.
U.N. officials describe the kidnapping of illegal migrants in Mexico as "epidemic" in scope.
"We have definitely begun to see a greater degree of violence in the shipping of migrants north to the United States," said Juan Carlos Calleros Alarcón, a director of policy at the National Migration Institute, which is responsible for detaining and deporting illegal visitors.
He said local authorities appear to be involved in the kidnappings.
The migrants are preyed on by roving gangs that operate along the Guatemalan border. Once in Mexico, many migrants ride on dangerous freight trains to bypass immigration checkpoints. Local police, taxi drivers and city officials often demand bribes or deliver them to kidnappers, according to the migrants and research by government and human rights workers.
Amnesty International says that as many as six in 10 women experience sexual violence during the journey.
Mexican government officials stress that only a handful of complaints are filed against federal immigration agents. The government has sped up the process of returning illegal migrants to their countries. Detention centers are newly built buildings; the migrants ride home in air-conditioned buses.
At a meeting Wednesday, Interior Minister Fernando Gomez Mont, the U.S. ambassador and the governors of the southern Mexican states pledged to work harder to protect migrants.
Like 'merchandise'
The small city of Ixtepec in the humid hills of Oaxaca is a crossroads for illegal migrants moving north on trains. At the edge of town, along the tracks at a shelter for migrants run by the Catholic church, 100 migrants slept on cardboard in the shade, waiting for an afternoon meal, before they move on.
Sergio Alejandro Barillas Perez, a Guatemalan at the shelter, said he was kidnapped in the gulf state of Veracruz this month and held for three days by men who said they worked for the Zetas.
He said his kidnappers demanded $10,000 for him and his girlfriend. "They told me if you don't give us the phone numbers, we'll kill your girlfriend," said Barillas, whose face was still bruised. "We were all in a house, a normal house. When they beat us, they would put a rag in our mouths and they turned on the music, loud, like they're having a party."
He said the kidnappers knocked out his girlfriend's teeth and dragged her away. He and others escaped. He said he does not know what happened to his girlfriend.
"These migrants aren't people -- they are merchandise to the mafias, who traffic drugs, weapons, sex and migrants," said Alejandro Solalinde, the Catholic priest who runs the Brothers of the Road shelter in Ixtepec. "They suck everything out of them."
The priest said that federal authorities do not protect the migrants and that local officials also look the other way, or take their cut from the robbers and traffickers.
Solalinde has battled local authorities who want to shut down his shelter, which feeds as many as 66,000 passing migrants in a year. More than 100 were at the shelter last week.
The priest said many Mexicans are distrustful of the outsiders. In 2008, townspeople became enraged when a Nicaraguan man who was living in Ixtepec was accused of raping a young girl. As police and the mayor were outside the gates at the shelter, Solalinde said, 100 angry protesters got inside.
"They had stones and sticks and gasoline," the priest said. "They wanted to burn us down."
Researcher Michael E. Miller in Mexico City contributed to this report.
Soldiers at Checkpoint Shot at Truck Carrying Burmese Migrants
March 5, 2010
A bullet-ridden pick-up truck after it was shot by Thai soldiers in the southern province of Ranong when the driver tried to smuggle 13 migrants from Burma through a security checkpoint on February 25, 2010. Three migrant children were killed and five adult migrants were injured.
The government needs to carry out an immediate investigation into why and how the army opened fire on this truck. Shooting into a truck apparently without concern for who could be killed or wounded is not acceptable. Those responsible need to face the consequences.
Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch
(New York) - The Thai government should promptly investigate the use of lethal force by Thai soldiers against Burmese migrants, which resulted in the death of three children, Human Rights Watch said today.
The army said soldiers fired on a pick-up truck carrying 13 undocumented migrant workers from Burma on February 25, 2010, after the driver failed to heed a signal to stop for inspection. Human Rights Watch has obtained photos showing that the truck was riddled with bullet holes.
"The government needs to carry out an immediate investigation into why and how the army opened fire on this truck," said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. "Shooting into a truck apparently without concern for who could be killed or wounded is not acceptable. Those responsible need to face the consequences."
The shooting in Pak Nam sub-district, Ranong province, involved soldiers from the 25th Infantry Division under the overall command of Col. Pornsak Punsawad. The soldiers opened fire with assault rifles at about 5 a.m. on February 25, when the driver failed to heed a signal to stop for inspection near a fishing pier, the army said. The children killed were a three or four-year-old boy, a six or seven-year-old girl, and a 16-year-old boy. Five others in the truck were wounded.
Human Rights Watch urged both the Thai government and the National Human Rights Commission to conduct transparent and thorough investigations immediately into the shooting. If excessive or illegal force is found to have been used, all those responsible, including those at the officer level who gave orders or were otherwise involved, should be prosecuted or disciplined in an appropriate manner, Human Rights Watch said.
Human Rights Watch said that Thai soldiers, when performing law enforcement duties, should strictly abide by the United Nations Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials. The Basic Principles require that law enforcement officials shall as far as possible apply nonviolent means before resorting to the use of force. Whenever the use of force is unavoidable, they must use restraint and act in proportion to the seriousness of the offense. The legitimate objective should be achieved with minimal damage and injury, and with respect for the preservation of human life.
Human Rights Watch also called on the Thai government to provide unfettered access for investigators to the survivors and to ensure that none of the survivors are deported to Burma while investigations are conducted. The Thai government should also provide humanitarian assistance to the surviving victims and ensure that appropriate compensation is paid to the families of the three dead children.
"This episode shows that the government needs to rethink its approach to border security," Adams said. "What is needed are well-trained civilian border police, who are less likely to be trigger-happy than soldiers. The government should act urgently to avoid a repeat of such a horrific human tragedy."
Eighty percent of migrant workers in Thailand are from Burma. Millions of these workers and their families have fled repression and poverty in Burma, only to find abuse and exploitation in Thailand. Apart from the deadly risks at heavily armed checkpoints along the border areas, migrants who manage to find their way into Thailand also suffer at the hands of corrupt civil servants and police, unscrupulous employers, and violent thugs. Local police and officials frequently ignore or fail to investigate complaints effectively.
Human Rights Watch's recent report, "From the Tiger to the Crocodile: Abuse of Migrant Workers in Thailand," detailed the widespread and severe human rights violations faced by migrant workers in Thailand - including killings, torture in detention, extortion, sexual abuse, and labor rights abuses. The perpetrators of those abuses have little fear of consequences, Human Rights Watch said, because they know that undocumented migrants fear deportation if they complain through legal channels.
The vulnerability of undocumented migrants has increased as a result of the Thai government's decision requiring all migrants to enter a process to verify their nationalities by March 2, or face arrest and deportation.
"Migrant workers make huge contributions to Thailand's economy, but receive little protection from abuse and exploitation," Adams said. "It is time for the Thai government to do the right thing by showing migrants that the state will provide justice for them when they suffer abuse."
By Michael Alison Chandler Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, January 17, 2010; C01
When Hussna Azamy was 5, she began her schooling in the living room of her family's apartment in Herat, Afghanistan. Her only classmate was a sister; their teachers were their parents. For up to five hours a day, they studied the Dari alphabet, fundamentals of math and science, and how to read the Koran.
Hussna and her older sister, Farah, came of school age in Afghanistan in the 1990s, when it was forbidden to educate girls and most of the country's schools had been destroyed. They yearned to see the inside of an actual school.
Their aspirations became real after the Taliban fell in 2001, and later, they carried their academic dreams thousands of miles to a country with one of the world's most renowned education systems.
But after less than a year in the United States -- where Hussna, 17, and her younger sister, Tamana, 13, quickly became A students in Prince William County schools -- the family plans to return to Afghanistan. Their father wants to help rebuild his country, work he has been unable to find here.
The girls, given a taste of American education, do not want to leave. They are afraid to entrust their ambitions to a system that is still vulnerable and far behind.
"I cry sometimes alone at night, sometimes with my sisters," said Hussna, a junior at Gar-Field High School in Woodbridge and an aspiring computer scientist. She worries that her lessons in Afghanistan will not be as up-to-date as those here or, worse, that girls might again be barred from schools.
Three decades of war left Afghanistan's schools in shambles, and many of its people are illiterate. Since the fall of the Taliban, the country has made strides in rebuilding, with help from foreign governments and international charities. There were 700,000 boys enrolled in primary or secondary schools in Afghanistan in 2001, according to Ministry of Education estimates. Since then, enrollment has swelled to about 7 million students, and 37 percent are female.
In recent years, the resurgence of the Taliban has brought fresh threats to the education of girls, particularly in rural areas in southern and eastern Afghanistan. But aid workers and analysts say the overwhelming demand for education and the momentum girls have achieved will continue.
The Azamys lived in Herat, a city in western Afghanistan, near the Iranian border. In 2001, the girls returned to school, donning black clothes and white head scarves to join hundreds of other girls at long tables under a big tent before moving into a renovated school building next door.
Each day, they checked around their desks for bombs and handed over their bags to be searched. Their mother, Farzana Azamy, walked them to and from school each day and worried for their safety in the hours they were away. But the girls enjoyed school and excelled in their studies.
Farah, now 21, received top marks on a grueling national college entrance exam, and in 2008, she became one of an elite group of Afghan women to enroll in a public university to study medicine.
She dropped out soon after she began college, though, because the family was preparing to move to the United States. The Azamys had long sought to join relatives in Virginia and to live far from bomb blasts in a place with good schools.
After years of waiting, their visas were issued by the U.S. consulate in spring 2008, and their departure seemed imminent. But paperwork continued to drag on. The family put schooling and jobs on hold and waited in Kabul and then Islamabad for a year before they could leave.
Last May, they moved in with a relative in Woodbridge, and their father, Ahmad Zahid Azamy, 46, began to look for work. The college-educated Azamy had spent nearly eight years working for the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan. He traveled the country monitoring conflicts, human rights violations and the piecemeal development of local government institutions. He hoped to find related work in the United States as an adviser or researcher for one of the many Washington-based organizations focused on Afghanistan.
"I have done a lot for Afghanistan," he said. "I have this view that I can still do a lot . . . for peace in my country."
He was still unemployed in September when his family rented a townhouse in Woodbridge, spending savings accumulated over many years. Hussna and Tamana enrolled in school.
American high school was overwhelming and exciting for Hussna. Teachers helped her navigate the enormous building between periods, when hallways swarmed with students. She learned what it meant to be "tardy" and how to follow a schedule marked with blue days and red days.
She traded her head scarf and black clothes for brightly colored sweaters, jeans and sneakers. And she quickly adjusted to American-style education, with lots of student interaction.
Although not yet fluent in English, Hussna was bored at first by her courses, which included basic math and science, with extra help from an English teacher. Her teachers noticed her abilities, and within a few weeks she was enrolled in the school's rigorous International Baccalaureate courses for biology and advanced algebra.
One morning this month, she was surrounded by the bubbling sound of fish tanks in biology lab. The teacher divided the class into teams and asked them to draw pictures of the various stages of photosynthesis and respiration. Hussna grabbed a marker and began to sketch the Krebs cycle.
She easily explained to her classmates how the chemical reactions happen, ultimately yielding energy and carbon dioxide. Some students stared wide-eyed as she talked. One mumbled: "Wow. Someone who knows what she is talking about."
Biology teacher James Nolan said Hussna often takes the lead in class. "She has set the curve on a few tests already," he said.
Her report cards have been filled with A's, and an assistant principal said she should be considered for the school's gifted program.
But as she and her younger sister blossom at school, her family is struggling at home.
Farah had hoped to enroll in community college and eventually pursue a medical degree. But her family has no car and no money to pay for tuition. So she spends long days at home, listening to music and quizzing herself from a geometry textbook.
A father's frustrations
Her father spends his days worrying about money and watching the news from Afghanistan. "It's nearly one year now that I am jobless," he said.
He described a frustrating job search, filled with unreturned calls and e-mails and promises of help from former employers in Afghanistan that did not materialize.
His relatives here have found jobs in banks or driving taxicabs. But he does not want work that is unrelated to his expertise about Afghanistan, knowledge that he thinks is critical to this country's security. His job worries have been compounded by health problems that he and his wife could not afford to have treated here. Finally, this winter, he decided that the family should go back.
The plan is to move to Kabul, and to move soon, so Farah, after a two-year hiatus, can enroll again in college before the next term begins in March.
The father is deeply disappointed to be starting over again, but he hopes that his daughters will find new academic opportunities and that he will be able to support his family. Kabul is home to the country's flagship public university, which is undergoing extensive rebuilding.
There is also the recently opened American University, a private school that offers scholarships and computer science degrees.
The decision has pitted him against all the women in his family, who want somehow to stay. But they are slowly preparing to go.
Hussna has begun telling her teachers that soon she will be gone. "I know that we can't stay here," she said.
TOKYO -- Fida Khan, a gangly 14-year-old, told the court that immigration authorities should not deport him and his family merely because his foreign-born parents lacked proper visas when they came to Japan more than 20 years ago.
During the past two decades, his Pakistani father and Filipino mother have held steady jobs, raised children, paid taxes and have never been in trouble with the law.
"I have the right to do my best to become a person who can contribute to this society," Fida told a Tokyo district court in Japanese, the only language he speaks.
But the court ruled last year that Fida has no right to stay in the country where he was born. Unless a higher court or the Minister of Justice intervenes, a deportation order will soon split the Khan family, sending the father, Waqar Hassan Khan, back to Pakistan, while dispatching Fida and his sister Fatima, 7, to the Philippines with their mother, Jennette.
Aggressive enforcement of Japanese immigration laws has increased in recent years as the country's economy has floundered and the need for cheap foreign labor has fallen.
Nationality in Japan is based on blood and parentage, not place of birth. This island nation was closed to the outside world until the 1850s, when U.S. warships forced it to open up to trade. Wariness of foreigners remains a potent political force, one that politicians dare not ignore, especially when the economy is weak.
As a result, the number of illegal immigrants has been slashed, often by deportation, from 300,000 in 1995 to just 130,000, a minuscule number in comparison to other rich countries. The United States, whose population is 2 1/2 times that of Japan's, has about 90 times as many illegal immigrants (11.6 million).
Among highly developed countries, Japan also ranks near the bottom in the percentage of legal foreign residents. Just 1.7 percent are foreign or foreign-born, compared with about 12 percent in the United States. Japan held a pivotal election last year and voters tossed out a party that had ruled for nearly 50 years. But the winner, the Democratic Party of Japan, has so far done nothing to alter immigration policy.
That policy, in a country running low on working-age people, is helping to push Japan off a demographic cliff. It already has fewer children and more elderly as a percentage of its population than any country in recorded history. If trends continue, the population of 127 million will shrink by a third in 50 years and by two-thirds in a century. By 2060, Japan will have two retirees for every three workers -- a ratio that will weaken and perhaps wreck pension and health-care systems.
These dismal numbers upset Masaki Tsuchiya, who manages a Tokyo welding company that for seven years has employed Waqar Khan.
"If Khan is deported, it will not be possible to find anyone like him, as many Japanese workers have lost their hungriness," said Tsuchiya, who has urged Japanese immigration officials to rescind the deportation order for the Khan family. "When the Japanese population is declining, I believe our society has to think more seriously about immigration."
At the Ministry of Justice, immigration officials say they are simply carrying out rules politicians make. The rules, though, are not particularly precise. They grant wide leeway to bureaucrats to use their own discretion in deciding who stays and who gets deported. Last year, immigration officials granted "special permits" to 8,500 undocumented foreigners, with about 65 percent of them going to those who had married a Japanese citizen.
Exercising their discretion under the law, immigration authorities last year offered Noriko Calderon, 13, the wrenching choice of living with her parents or living in her homeland. The girl, who was born and educated in the Tokyo suburbs, could stay in Japan, the government ruled. But she had to say goodbye to her Filipino mother and father, who were deported after living illegally in Japan for 16 years. Following tearful goodbyes at a Tokyo airport, Noriko remained in Japan with an aunt.
Japan's growing need for working-age immigrants has not gone unnoticed by senior leaders in government and business. Slightly relaxed rules have admitted skilled professionals and guest workers. The number of legal foreign residents reached an all-time high of 2.2 million at the end of 2008, with Chinese accounting for the largest group, followed by Koreans, Brazilians (mostly of Japanese descent) and Filipinos.
Still, experts say these numbers are far too low to head off significant economic contraction. A group of 80 politicians said last year that the country needs 10 million immigrants by 2050. Japan's largest business federation called for 15 million, saying: "We cannot wait any longer to aggressively welcome necessary personnel."
Yet the treatment of foreign workers already in Japan is unpredictable. The government opened service centers last year to help foreign workers who lost their jobs to recession. For the first time, it offered them free language training, along with classes on social integration. As that program got underway, however, the government began giving money -- about $12,000 for a family of four -- to foreign workers, if they agreed to go home immediately and never come back to work.
The Khan family's troubles began two years, when a policeman nabbed Waqar Khan on his way home from work. He was detained for nine months. Police in Japan often stop foreign-looking people on the street and ask for residency documents.
The letter of the law was clearly against Khan and his wife. He had overstayed a 15-day tourist visa by 20 years. She came into the country on a forged passport.
But they have refused to sign deportation documents, arguing that although their papers are bad, their behavior as foreigners has been exemplary. Under Japanese law, foreigners are eligible to become naturalized citizens if they have lived in the country for more than five years, have good behavior and are self-sufficient.
The Khans also argue that their children, who regard themselves as Japanese, are assets for Japan. "It is a bit weird that the country needs children, but it is saying to us, go away," Khan said.
The family's lawyer, Gen'ichi Yamaguchi, has tried -- and so far failed -- to convince immigration officials and judges that the Khans are just the sort of hardworking, Japanese-speaking immigrants that the country should embrace for the sake of its own future.
"During the bubble years, the number of illegal workers increased a lot and the police looked the other way," Yamaguchi said. "Japan has always looked at immigrants as cheap but disposable labor."
An appeals court is scheduled to rule on the Khan case in the first week of February.
Special correspondent Akiko Yamamoto contributed to this report.
By Peter Whoriskey Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, January 17, 2010; A16
MIAMI -- In this city's Little Haiti, anxious text messages relay the news.
From under the earthquake's rubble, a relative punches into a cellphone: "I'm trapped." Survivors running out of water plead for someone to help. Often the messages are just inquiries: Has anyone heard from this friend, that family member?
The earthquake in Haiti has dismayed television viewers across the United States. But many people here are unnerved not just by their closeness to the site of the disaster but also by the difficulty of responding before it's too late. Bottlenecks have kept many supplies and rescuers from getting to Haiti and, more personally, prevented Haitian Americans from answering requests from stricken relatives.
In a demonstration of concern, Vice President Biden made two stops in Little Haiti on Saturday, promising government and church leaders that help was on the way for the residents of Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital.
"On behalf of the administration, our hearts ache for you," Biden told about 30 officials gathered Saturday morning at the Little Haiti Cultural Center.
Marie Etienne, a nursing professor at Miami Dade College, attended one meeting. She has been frustrated because a group of hundreds of Haitian American nurses that she organized has been unable to reach the island.
"It's heartbreaking," she said. "We see things on TV, and we feel powerless."
The sense of danger that comes with each passing hour is acute. Over the past few days, this is what Rasha Cameau, 40, the manager of a Haitian cultural center here, has learned via text messages from her sister:
Her elderly parents, their house flattened, have no food.
Her cousin, who had sent the text message alerting people that he was buried in the rubble, died before he could be rescued.
"I keep telling my parents that help is coming so they won't lose hope," she said, tearing up.
Her husband has volunteered to join rescue efforts, and she is helping through the city of Miami, her employer.
But, she said, "My dad keeps saying: 'We are going to die here.' "
The urge to assist, nonetheless, has spurred numerous efforts.
The Catholic Archdiocese of Miami is pressing for clearance to bring Haitian children orphaned by the earthquake into the United States in an operation similar to one that brought thousands of Cuban children to this country after the 1959 revolution. The Cuban operation was known as Pedro Pan; the prospective Haitian one has been dubbed Pierre Pan. On Saturday, church officials asked Biden to help clear the way for the flights.
With some predicting another migratory exodus from Haiti, Miami-Dade County is reviewing what it calls a mass migration plan. So far, there have been no signs of organized attempts to flee Haiti.
Grass-roots donations have surged. Every Miami-Dade library, fire station and police district station is being organized to handle the outpouring. Employees at the Walgreens in Little Haiti, where six of 30 workers have yet to hear from relatives in Haiti, have set up a $5 carwash operation to raise money. Corporate donations have funded a call center where Haitian Americans can call home. Community activists are planning to hold a public wake in Little Haiti Sunday night.
Local Haitian radio personality Piman Bouk (Haitian Creole for "hot pepper") said the need to help is felt intensely. Bouk, a Christian, has been on the radio advising people to "forget about the voodoo."
"So many people are in the ground, in the rubble," he said in front of his restaurant in Little Haiti. "They don't eat. They don't drink. They are suffering. If they are still alive, we must say, 'Thanks be to God.' "
"The entire community is emotionally attached to Haiti, and it's been rough," said Rep. Kendrick B. Meek (D-Fla.), who has convened meetings in the area to coordinate relief efforts. "People really want to do something."
Haitian American employees form the base of a number of big companies in the region, Meek said, many of them at hotels, prompting firms to offer help.
In a blog post last week, Marriott International Chairman Bill Marriott, writing from the Harbor Beach Marriott in Fort Lauderdale, said that more than a third of the "associates" at the hotel are Haitian and have been affected by the disaster.
"They are struggling with trying to find out what has happened to their families and loved ones," Marriott wrote. "They have a group get-together for prayer and song every morning and our hearts go out to them all."
Community leaders and others say they hope that the attention to the poverty-stricken nation will last. On his visit Saturday, Biden promised that it would.
He said the Obama administration views earthquake relief as a possibly years-long effort.
"We are there to rescue," Biden told the community leaders. "We are there to secure. We are there to rebuild.
"This president does not view this as a humanitarian mission that is going to have a life cycle of a month. This will be on our radar screen -- dead-center -- long after it is off of the CNN crawl at the bottom of the screen."
The United States is home to about 535,000 Haitian immigrants — the largest concentration in any single country of Haitians abroad. As the country descended into chaos following the collapse of the Duvalier dictatorship in the late 1980s, Haitians began arriving in the United States in large numbers. Many received humanitarian protection. Between 1980 and 2000, the Haitian-born population residing in the United States more than quadrupled from 92,000 to 419,000. The Haitian immigrant population in the United States has continued to grow since 2000, although at a slower rate. Recent natural disasters in Central America and the Caribbean have pushed large numbers of migrants to the United States and in the wake of the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, emigration pressures from the devastated country are likely to grow.
The Haitian diaspora in the United States has also traditionally played an important role in assisting Haiti recover from natural disasters. More than half of all Haitian immigrants resided in just two states, Florida and New York, although they are also concentrated in New Jersey and Massachusetts (for more information on immigrants by state, please see the ACS/Census Data tool on the MPI Data Hub).
This spotlight focuses on Haitian immigrants in the United States, examining the population's size, geographic distribution, and socioeconomic characteristics using data from the US Census Bureau's 2008 American Community Survey (ACS) and 2000 Decennial Census, and the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Immigration Statistics (OIS) for 2008.
Click on the bullet points below for more information:
There were 535,000 foreign born from Haiti residing in the United States in 2008. There were 534,969 foreign born from Haiti residing in the United States in 2008, making up 1.4 percent of all immigrants. The population has more than quintupled since 1980, when the decennial census counted 92,395 Haitian immigrants, and nearly 20-fold since 1970 when there were 28,026 Haitian-born in the United States.
Up until 1990, the foreign born from Haiti ranked behind most foreign-born groups in terms of size (see Table 1). For instance, in 1980, the number of Haitian born in the United States (92,395) was smaller than the foreign-born population from the Netherlands (103,136), Hungary (144,368), and Austria (145,607).
By 2008, the Haitian-born population was more than five times larger than the Dutch (85,635) and Hungarian (80,333) immigrant populations and ten times larger than the foreign-born population from Austria (52,707).
In 2008, the Haitian born were the fourth largest immigrant group from the Caribbean basin following the foreign born from Cuba (974,657), the Dominican Republic (771,910), and Jamaica (636,589) (see Table 1; see also the pie charts showing the top 10 countries of birth of immigrants residing in the United States over time here [INSERT LINK]).
About one of every 20 Haitians resides in the United States. The 535,000 Haitian immigrants in the United States represent about one-twentieth (5.5 percent) of the total population of Haiti (9.8 million in 2008).
More than 70 percent of the Haitian born resided in Florida and New York. Florida had the largest number of foreign-born residents from Haiti (247,991, or 46.4 percent of the total Haitian-born population) in 2008, followed by New York (128,750, or 24.1 percent).
The next two states with large Haitian-born populations accounted for an additional 14.7 percent of Haitians residing in the United States: New Jersey (40,773, or 7.6 percent) and Massachusetts (37,936, or 7.1 percent).
Between 2000 and 2008, two states saw the size of their Haitian immigrant population grow by more than 10,000 people. In two states the Haitian immigrant population grew by more than 10,000 people between 2000 and 2008: Florida, where it grew by 66,000 from 182,000 to 248,000) and Georgia where the population tripled from 5,000 to 15,000.
More than three-quarters of Haitian immigrants resided in five metropolitan areas. Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach, FL, was the metropolitan area with the largest number of Haitian born (183,108, or 34.2 percent of the total Haitian-born population), followed by New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, NY-NJ-PA (159,444, or 29.8 percent), Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NH (34,757, or 6.5 percent), Orlando-Kissimmee, FL (24,183, or 4.5 percent), and Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Marietta, GA (14,449, or 2.7 percent). These five metropolitan areas accounted for 77.8 percent of the 535,000 Haitian immigrants in the United States.
Over one-quarter of all Haitian foreign born in the United States arrived in 2000 or later. As of 2008, 27.7 percent of the 535,000 Haitian foreign born entered the country in 2000 or later, with 28.8 percent entering between 1990 and 1999, 26.5 percent between 1980 and 1989, 11.2 percent between 1970 and 1979, and the remaining 5.8 percent prior to 1970.
Two-thirds of Haitian immigrants in 2008 were adults of working age. Of the Haitian immigrants residing in the United States in 2008, 8.4 percent were minors (under age 18), 67.3 percent were adults of working age (between 18 and 54), and 24.3 percent were seniors (age 55 and older).
Of the total foreign-born population in the United States in 2008, 7.4 percent were minors, 69.0 percent were of working age, and 23.6 percent were seniors.
The median age of Haitian immigrants in the United States in 2008 was 43.1 compared to 40.8 among all foreign born and 38.2 among all immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean.
Haitian immigrant women outnumbered men in 2008. Of all Haitian immigrants residing in the United States in 2008, 54.0 percent were women and 46.0 percent were men. Among all immigrants, 49.8 percent were women and 50.2 percent were men.
Haitian immigrants were more likely than other immigrant groups to be naturalized US citizens. Among the Haitian foreign born, 48.4 percent were naturalized US citizens, compared to 43.0 percent among the overall foreign-born population.
About half of Haitian immigrants in 2008 were limited English proficient. About 7.5 percent of Haitian immigrants age 5 and older reported speaking "English only" while 39.0 percent reported speaking English "very well." In contrast, 53.6 percent reported speaking English less than "very well," similar to the 52.1 percent reported among all foreign born age 5 and older.
(Note: The term limited English proficient refers to any person age 5 and older who reported speaking English "not at all," "not well," or "well" on their survey questionnaire. Individuals who reported speaking only English or speaking English "very well" are considered proficient in English).
Nearly half of Haitian foreign-born adults had some college education. In terms of academic achievement, Haitian immigrants were concentrated in the middle of the education continuum. In 2008, 28.5 percent of the 458,000 Haitian-born adults age 25 and older had some college education or an Associate's degree compared to 18.4 percent among the 31.9 million foreign-born adults. An additional 16.9 percent of Haitian immigrants had a bachelor's degree or higher compared to 27.1 percent among all foreign-born adults.
On the other end of the education continuum, 26.0 percent of Haitian-born adults had no high school diploma or the equivalent general education diploma (GED), substantially lower than the 32.5 percent among all foreign-born adults. About 28.6 percent had a high school diploma or GED compared to 21.9 percent among all foreign-born adults.
Haitian immigrant women were more likely to participate in the civilian labor force than foreign-born women overall. In 2008, Haitian-born women age 16 and older (71.7 percent) were more likely to participate in the civilian labor force than all foreign-born women (57.1 percent) overall. Haitian-born men were about equally as likely to be in the civilian labor force (80.7 percent) as foreign-born men overall (80.6 percent).
Nearly half of employed Haitian-born men worked in services or in construction, extraction, and transportation. Among the 168,000 Haitian-born male workers age 16 and older employed in the civilian labor force in 2008, 26.1 percent reported working in services and 22.3 percent reported working in construction, extraction, or transportation (see Table 2). By contrast, among the 13.6 million foreign-born male workers age 16 and older employed in the civilian labor force in 2008, 17.4 percent reported working in services and 25.9 percent reported working in construction, extraction, or transportation.
Over one of every four employed Haitian-born women worked in healthcare support. Among the 182,000 Haitian-born female workers age 16 and older employed in the civilian labor force in 2008, 27.2 percent reported working in healthcare support occupations and 22.7 percent reported working in service occupations (see Table 2). By contrast, among the 9.5 million foreign-born female workers age 16 and older employed in the civilian labor force in 2008, 5.4 percent reported working in healthcare support and 25.7 percent reported working in service occupations.
Haitian immigrants were less likely to live in poverty than other immigrant groups. The poverty rate among Haitian immigrant families was 12.9 percent in 2008, lower than the poverty rate among all foreign born families (14.9 percent). The difference was even larger among immigrant families headed by a female householder with no spouse present. Among Haitian immigrant households headed by a female with no husband present, the poverty rate was 20.8 percent in 2008, compared to 30.7 percent for all immigrants.
Legal and Unauthorized Haitian Immigrant Population
There were about 230,000 Haitian lawful permanent residents (LPRs) in 2008. There were about 230,000 Haitian-born lawful permanent residents (LPRs) in the United States in 2008, about 1.8 percent of the estimated total 12.6 million LPRs.
Based on the 2000 Census, the federal government estimated that there were 76,000 unauthorized Haitian immigrants living in the United States. The most recent published estimates from the Department of Homeland Security, based on analysis of the 2000 Census, suggest that the unauthorized immigrant population from Haiti grew from 67,000 in 1990 to 76,000 in 2000. Haitians accounted for 1.1 percent of all unauthorized immigrants in the United States in 2000, the 11th-largest unauthorized immigrant group in the country.
Most Haitians who received LPR status in 2008 came as family-based immigrants. In 2008, 26,007 LPRs were admitted from Haiti, 2.3 percent of the 1.1 million LPRs admitted. Of these, 37.2 percent (9,675) came as family-based immigrants and an additional 34.4 percent (8,958) arrived as the immediate relatives of US citizens. An additional 21.6 percent (5,620) arrived as refugees or asylum seekers.
Over half of Haitian-born lawful permanent residents in 2008 were eligible to naturalize. About 140,000 of the estimated 230,000 Haitian-born LPRs (60.9 percent) were eligible to naturalize as of January 2008.
In 2008, the United States deported 1,098 Haitian nationals. In 2008, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) located and deported 1,098 Haitian nationals. In January 2010, DHS announced a temporary stay on deportations to Haiti in the wake of the massive earthquake that hit the country.
For information about ACS methodology, sampling error, and nonsampling error, click here.
Sources
Monger, Randall and Nancy Rytina. 2009. U.S. Legal Permanent Residents : 2008. US Department of Homeland Security, Office of Immigration Statistics. Available online.
Rytina, Nancy. 2009. Estimates of the Legal Permanent Resident Population in 2008. October 2009. US Department of Homeland Security, Office of Immigration Statistics. Available online.
US Census Bureau. 2008 American Community Survey. Accessed from Steven Ruggles, Matthew Sobek, Trent Alexander, et al., Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 3.0. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota Population Center, 2004.
US Department of Homeland Security, Office of Immigration Statistics. 2008 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics. Various tables. Available online.
World Bank. 2009. World Development Indicators. Washington, DC. Available online.
US Immigration and Naturalization Service, Office of Policy and Planning. Nd. Estimates of the Unauthorized Immigrant Population Residing in the United States: 1990 to 2000. Washington, DC. Available online
-- Click on title of this postings to see tables associated with article. - John --
The Euro-Burma Office (EBO) will focus funding on Burmese migrant workers and internally displaced persons (IDPs) in ethnic areas where armed conflicts are active, according to the organization's Executive Director, Harn Yawnghwe.
The decision came after the meeting between the Brussels-based EBO and Burmese opposition, civil society groups and ethnic groups in Chiang Mai in northern Thailand from Dec. 1 to 2.
Yawnghwe said his organization wants to strengthen civil society groups assisting migrant workers and IDPs because such people are in need.
Any group wanting to assist migrant workers or IDPs in armed conflict zones in eastern Burma can submit proposals to the EU donors.
“Euro Burma want to set up committees to assist these groups and want to give funds to them. Those who are interested are asked to submit proposals,” said Dr. Thiha Maung, who attended the meeting and is the director of the National Health and Education Committee's (NHEC) health program.
It is likely that the EBO will secure some funding for exile-based aid groups as funding for cross-border activities is unstable and many Western government donors are not willingly providing further cross-border aid to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in exile, he added.
Founded in 1997, the Brussels-based EBO helps the Burmese democracy movement prepare for transition to democracy and keeps the international community informed about the situation in Burma.
Transparency and accountability of funding among border-based NGOs were also discussed at the meeting.
“International donor countries such as Sweden, Norway, Canada and Australia are hoping for change in Burma in 2010 and want to focus aid directly inside Burma if the situation improves after 2010 election,” Thiha Maung said.
Harn Yawnghwe also said the EBO will provide financial supports to opposition parties or ethnic groups that will contest in the general elections in 2010 if they need support. This should not be misconstrued as EBO support for the Burmese regime 2008's constitution and planned 2010 elections, he said.
The aim of supporting those groups is to let them strive for democracy and ethnic rights within any political space that might be opened up by the Burmese regime, he added.
Observers said international donors indicated they want to focus humanitarian assistance directly inside Burma after they identified problems with cross-border aid.
However, observers said both internally-based aid and cross-border aid are needed since both reach different target populations, whether deep inside Burma or on the Thai-Burmese border.
Due to international donors reducing their funding and distancing themselves from cross-border aid projects, Mae Sot-based Mae Tao Clinic is concerned about funding, which has been cut and reduced.
The number of outpatients coming to the clinic has grown by about 20 percent per year, however.
The clinic, which treats Burmese migrants, refugees and Burmese people who cross the border for medical treat, is struggling with a “major funding crisis.” It faces a predicted shortfall of about US $750,000 in 2010, amounting to 25 percent of its operating budget, according to Dr Cynthia Maung writing on the clinic's Web site on Oct. 27.
Other border-based NGO aid groups are also struggling with the funding crisis, which has resulted in anomalous situations across the border. Schoolteachers in Mon State being provided for by funding from donors such as the NHEC, for example, have been working without salaries since June.
COPENHAGEN — Paris has its grand mosque, on the Left Bank. So does Rome, the city of the pope. Yet despite a sizable Muslim population, this Danish city has nothing but the occasional tiny storefront Muslim place of worship.
The city, Denmark’s capital, is now inching toward construction of not one, but two grand mosques. In August, the city council approved the construction of a Shiite Muslim mosque, replete with two 104-foot-tall minarets, in an industrial quarter on the site of a former factory. Plans are also afoot for a Sunni mosque. But it has been a long and complicated process, tangled up in local politics and the publication four years ago of cartoons mocking Islam.
The difficulties reflect the tortuous path Denmark has taken in dealing with its immigrants, most of whom are Muslim. Copenhagen in particular has been racked by gang wars, with shootouts and killings in recent months between groups of Hells Angels and immigrant bands.
The turmoil has fed the popularity of an anti-immigrant conservative party, the Danish People’s Party. In city elections scheduled for Nov. 17, the People’s Party, by some estimates, could double the roughly 6 percent of the vote it took in the last municipal election.
Denmark is not alone in grappling with the question. In Italy, the rightist Northern League opposes mosques in Italian cities; in Switzerland, voters will go to the polls on Nov. 29 in a referendum to decide whether to ban the construction of minarets.
In Denmark, it was the cartoons, one of which depicted Muhammad with a bomb in his turban, that gave the initial impetus to a movement for a mosque.
“I wrote a front-page story saying we somehow had to reconnect to the Muslims, to collect money to build a mosque as a sign of solidarity,” said Herbert Pundik, 82, the former editor of the Danish daily Politiken. Mr. Pundik, speaking by phone from Tel Aviv, where he now lives, said that within 24 hours there had been more than 1,000 positive responses. But then the Muslim reaction to the cartoons turned violent, with attacks on Danish embassies in several cities, including Beirut and Damascus.
“The steam went out of the project,” Mr. Pundik said.
Yet it did not die. Bijan Eskandani, the architect of the Shiite mosque, said he found inspiration for his design in the “Persian element in Islamic art,” which he said consisted of a “special lyric, poetic attitude.” The Shiite community, he said in written answers to questions, lacked the financial means to acquire a suitable site for a mosque. “The building lot they have is situated in an ugly, unattractive, inharmonious gray factory area,” he said, adding that, “a sparkling mosque there may make a difference.”
The very word Persian sends chills down Martin Henriksen’s spine. “We are against the mosque,” said Mr. Henriksen, 29, one of the People’s Party’s five-member directorate, in an interview in Copenhagen’s Parliament building. “It’s obvious to everyone that the Iranian regime has something to do with it,” he said. “The Iranian regime is based on a fascist identity that we don’t want to set foot in Denmark.”
Since becoming party to the national government coalition in 2001, the People’s Party has helped enact legislation to stem the flow of immigrants and raise the bar for obtaining citizenship. Immigrants, Mr. Henriksen insists, “need to show an ability and a will to become Danes.” He cites past Jewishimmigration as an example. “Many Jews have come to Denmark since the 16th century,” he said. “We don’t have discussions about whether to build synagogues.” There are at least four synagogues in the city.
Abdul Wahid Pedersen, whose parents are Scandinavian, converted to Islam years ago. “I was 28, a child of the 60s,” he said. Now 55, he is chairman of a 15-member committee promoting construction of a grand mosque for Copenhagen’s Sunni Muslims.
He concedes that of the estimated 250,000 Muslims in a Danish population of 5.5 million, only about 35,000 are Sunnis. Yet he defends the need for a grand mosque and says that while the Sunni community is not soliciting financing from Saudi Arabia, as the People’s Party contends, he has no problem accepting a donation. “If someone wants to chip in, that is O.K.,” he said, in the shop in a working-class neighborhood where he sells Islamic literature, prayer rugs and other religious objects. “But they will have no influence on running the place.” Mr. Pedersen said his committee was even considering installing wind turbines atop the minarets and covering the mosque’s dome with one large solar panel.
The city’s deputy mayor, Klaus Bondam, 45, defends the right of Muslims to their mosques. The minarets, he said, would be “quite slim towers, we’re not going to be Damascus or Cairo.” The city had also made clear there would be no calling to prayers from the mosques’ minarets. As to the charge of foreign underwriting, Mr. Bondam said it did not concern him as long as the sources were listed openly.
But he said he feared that the debate over the mosques could help the People’s Party double its share of the vote in this month’s local elections to as much as 12 percent. “It’s the little discomfit of people of other religion or background,” he said. “Why can’t they be like me?”
For Toger Seidenfaden, 52, the present editor of Politiken, the People’s Party is “democratic and parliamentary — they are not brownshirts.” But he said they were a “very Danish, nationalist party — they’d like Denmark before globalization.”
On the broad avenue called Njalsgade, where the Sunni mosque is to be built on a vacant lot, Preben Anderson, 61, a bricklayer, said he had nothing against a mosque, though he pointedly said that he could not speak for his neighbors. “We have churches,” he said. “We have to have mosques.” He stood across the street from where weeds and junk now cover the lot where the Sunni mosque could one day stand. One neighborhood resident, asked if he could point out the site where the mosque would be built, professed not to know.
Yet, Per Nielsen, 56, a retired history teacher, said the economic slowdown and the gang wars in nearby neighborhoods were feeding the popularity of the People’s Party. As for the mosque, he said, “There’s very strong pressure — people living here don’t want it.”
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.
“That’s too far for a switch,” the elder Zamora, 53, is saying, pointing to a hotel 10 miles outside of Siquirres. His plan is to use two vehicles for what he calls the “recovery,” or “snatchback.” Once he gets Andres, he intends to drive a white Toyota SUV to a switch point, where he will abandon the SUV and put Andres in the van. That way, any witnesses to the snatchback will report seeing the SUV headed west in the direction of the capital, San José—while in fact Gus and Andres will be in the van headed southeast toward Panama. But this hotel won’t work. “We definitely can’t come all the way back down this way,” Gus says. “I want to make time.”
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.”
Todd consulted with the U.S. Embassy in Costa Rica, which advised him to proceed with his plan to pick up Andres in early August. But when Todd flew to Costa Rica, Jason would not let him talk to the boy. Todd was livid. He had hoped to reason with Jason, but he realized that the man had no intention of backing down. So Todd got an injunction from a San José court ordering Jason to surrender Andres, and he and Helen accompanied the Costa Rican police when they went to Jason’s office to deliver it. Jason still refused to relinquish Andres, and Todd says the police told him that they didn’t have the right under Costa Rican law to enter Jason’s home and take the boy. Todd returned to Florida while Helen stayed in Costa Rica. Later in August, Jason challenged Helen’s maternal fitness in light of her drug habit and won temporary custody of Andres from a different Costa Rican court.
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 …”
Helen and Jason grew up in Siquirres. They met as teenagers and started dating seriously when she was 17 and he was 19. Jason moved to San José to attend dental school; Helen finished high school and followed him there. After two years, they began to grow apart. Jason told me he broke up with Helen because she cheated on him. Shortly thereafter, Helen told Jason she was pregnant. According to Helen, Jason wanted her to have an abortion. Jason denies this, adding that he promised to take responsibility for the child if he proved to be the father.
A few weeks later, Helen met Todd Hopson, 18 years her senior. The divorced father of an adult daughter, he was vacationing by himself at a golf resort on the outskirts of San José. Though neither spoke the other’s language, he and Helen ended up spending the rest of his vacation together, touring the Costa Rican capital.
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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