THE CITY OF LOST CHILDREN | PAGE 1, 2, 3, 4
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It is about an hour's drive from the smoggy, crowded streets of Sao Paulo, through rolling green hills, to Jundiaí, where favelas, or slums, with cramped rows of small homes of exposed red brick and tin lay on the perimeter of the city. When I went to the plaza last year, several dozen mothers were making their weekly vigil. They ranged from teenagers to women in their 50s and 60s; most were light-skinned and all looked poor and frazzled. One by one, they told me complicated tales, some stretching over several years, of their battles with Beethoven. A common theme quickly emerged: The judge had taken their children under false pretenses, in many cases claiming without evidence that they had been abused or abandoned. Some of the women charged that court officials actually went out looking for children to steal, prowling city streets in a car known as the cata-crianca -- the child hunter -- and paying informants in slum neighborhoods and hospitals.

"I never beat my children, as he claimed," said a stocky, sad-eyed woman named Silvana Barbosa Pereira, 34, holding a poster of four smiling and well-groomed children. She has not seen her children since 1994, when all four, aged 11 months to 6 years, were taken from her. The cata-crianca stopped at her door after someone made an anonymous complaint, she said she was later told. She has no idea where the children are today. "The only thing wrong with my family is that we're poor," said Pereira, "but that doesn't give him the right to decide what's best for us."

An unemployed nurse's aide, Maria Aparecida Salles, 39, told me that she also lost her three children, aged 5 through 9, five years ago, when she went to Beethoven for help in getting their father to pay support payments. She recalls signing a document that in her understanding gave permission for the children to be housed in a temporary shelter. That was the last time she saw them. "I have gone to his office once a month ever since then, and each time I ask, as politely as I can, that if they can't give my children back to me, for the love of God, just give me news of them," she said. Finally, last year, one of Beethoven's assistants took pity on her and told her that her children had been adopted by an Italian family. Salles said she was even given a photograph of three healthy and smiling children against a pleasant background of trees -- although, for reasons neither she nor any Jundiaí court officials can explain, the children's blond hair was now black and all three were wearing glasses.

"A welfare worker told me it would be a pity if I got them back," Salles said. "She said it's like they've won the lottery."

To be sure, reports of stolen children are often murkier than they first sound. Sometimes Latin American mothers willingly give up their babies, for cash or the simple hope of a better future, and then change their minds, as do birth mothers in the United States. Widespread and deep poverty can corrode even maternal bonds, and in destitute rural villages and some city slums, one often hears of mothers abandoning their children at the hospital or even in the street, or turning them over to others more willing to raise them. In "Death Without Weeping," her 1992 study of the impoverished Bahia slums of Bom Jesus da Mata, anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes wrote that "the abandonment of newborns by their overwrought mothers is so common in the maternity wing of the local hospital that a copybook is kept hanging on a cord just outside the nursery in which the data on abandonments and informal adoptions are recorded."

But illegally arranged foreign adoptions have become a big enough political issue in recent years that Bolivia, Chile and Peru have toughened laws and cracked down on corrupt lawyers and judges. Paraguay, which sent 1,900 adopted babies to the United States from 1990 to 1995, banned international adoptions altogether in 1996. In Guatemala, where more than 2,600 foreign adoptions took place between 1992 and 1995, the attorney general recently called for a suspension of all foreign adoptions until authorities can be better regulated.

The irony of the Jundiaí scandal is that Brazil's international adoption requirements are already some of the strictest in the world. In the 1970s and 1980s, nearly 19,000 infants and children were legally adopted from Brazil, while federal police believe thousands more left the country by means of illegal child-trafficking. By a law approved in 1990, adoptive parents must now live in Brazil with their new child for 30 days if the child is 2 or older, or 15 days for younger babies. The law also puts Brazilian parents first in line for the most sought-after babies: light-skinned newborns. Since 1990, most foreign applicants dealing with reputable agencies have adopted older children with darker skin or physical handicaps.

N E X T_ P A G E: Filling the demand for light-skinned newborns