BY KATHERINE ELLISON | JUNDIAÍ, Brazil -- Rita de Cassia lost her 2-year-old son in May 1997. Unwed, unemployed and just 18 years old, she had despaired when the boy's father abandoned her. In need of help to care for him, the shy, black-haired teen sought help from the chief of the local minors court, Judge Luiz Beethoven Giffoni Ferreira. The judge, who is most commonly referred to as Judge Beethoven, agreed to let the boy stay in a shelter until de Cassia found work -- or at least that's what she thought as she signed the papers he gave her. But when she came back to his office two months later, newly employed, de Cassia says she realized her child had been taken away.

"I got a lawyer who looked in my court file, and he told me it said I was a prostitute," de Cassia recalls with quiet indignation. "But that's a lie. No one ever came to interview me or talk to my neighbors. I don't know how they can say that."

Among the several dozen mothers who gather weekly in the plaza of Jundiaí, a town of 450,000 about 40 miles outside of Sao Paulo, de Cassia is regarded as lucky. She knows where her son is today, and it's not far: He was adopted by a local family. Many of the other women here are still trying to find out what happened to their children. They have named their group the Mothers of the Courthouse Plaza, inspired by Argentina's Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, whose children disappeared, presumably murdered, during that country's Dirty War between the government and suspected rebels. But no one believes the Jundiaí mothers' children are dead. The suspicion is that they were illegally and secretly placed in adoptive homes in Europe or the United States. Every Monday for nearly a year, the mothers have held protests outside the second-story window of the office of Judge Beethoven, to whom many say they went for help only to have their children stolen from them.

The Brazilian mothers' nightmare is a bitter result of the dream of adoptive parents from industrialized nations, who have flocked to the developing world in recent years in hopes of building families. As the number of U.S. babies available for adoption declines, due in part to wider use of birth control and legalized abortions, more and more Americans are traveling abroad in search of children. In the past eight years, the number of U.S. visas issued for children adopted internationally has nearly doubled, from 7,093 to 13,620.

As overseas adoptions have become more numerous, however, so have the legal and ethical complications involved for first worlders delving into unfamiliar cultures for the most intimate and serious of transactions. Once a mecca for U.S. adoptions, Latin America in particular has become the source of increasing tales of children being stolen or bought from destitute women to fill the growing demand from the North. Since the 1960s, whispers of gangs trafficking in babies or even baby organs for transplants have made their way into the Latin American press. While the persistent baby-organ rumor has never been substantiated, police throughout the region have gathered increasing evidence of a great many illegal adoptions.

It's no coincidence these problems are coming to light only now. When many Latin American nations were run by right-wing dictatorships, local newspapers weren't as free to investigate charges of child-stealing, particularly by authority figures like attorneys and judges. And the victims, mostly impoverished mothers, were either scared to come forward with their complaints or skeptical that anything would be done if they did.

That has allowed judges like Beethoven virtually free reign in deciding the fate of their children. A tall, imperious man whose name derives from his father's love of classical music, Beethoven has worked in minors courts in several Sao Paulo state cities for the past 20 years -- the first six of them during the 1964-85 military rule. For most of this decade, he has been a rare friend to Americans and Europeans whose search for a baby led them to his sunny courthouse office. Unlike most Latin American bureaucrats, famed for sloth, the judge is brisk, efficient and decisive -- as well as a passionate advocate of foreign adoptions. And he has been a notably prolific advocate, placing more than 200 children in foreign homes in the last six years, triple the average placed by other courts in Sao Paulo state, even as Brazil has tightened its adoption laws.

Now, however, Judge Beethoven has a formidable adversary in the mothers, who wear green scarves to symbolize hope and raise placards and photos of their babies and toddlers beneath his window. Aided by a relentless, publicity-wise local lawyer named Marcos Antonio Colagrossi, their campaign has become the most organized protest against illegal adoption in Latin America to date and has resulted in federal and state investigations of the judge. Outside Brazil, there are new, painful questions for adoptive parents -- particularly the families, from Boston to Berlin, who have received children from Beethoven's court.

"For years, he has taken children from parents who are poor and uneducated and haven't been able to fight back until now," the graying Colagrossi told me shortly after he became involved in the mothers' cause. The attorney, who specializes in child-welfare cases, first took issue with Beethoven about a year ago, when the Bar Association of Jundiaí asked him to investigate Beethoven's attempt to remove an 8-year-old from his mother's custody on the grounds that she had beaten him. When Colagrossi managed to get the case dropped, it made news, and other mothers began calling him with their stories.

"Pretty soon, they began meeting together in the plaza -- at first 10 of them, then 15, then 20, then 30," he said. "Other lawyers told me I was exaggerating, that this would go nowhere. But we managed to make the first popular protest against a Brazilian judge."

N E X T_ P A G E: "The only thing wrong with my family is that we're poor"

 
ILLUSTRATION BY JEFF CROSBY