Brazil court blocks father-son reunion

I hate to say it, but I knew it.

It was too soon to claim victory Monday, when a Brazilian federal court ruled in favor of David Goldman to be reunited with his son after a four-year custody battle.

The federal court ordered the boy to be handed over to him today at a U.S. consulate in Rio de Janeiro, but Brazil's supreme court agreed late Tuesday to hear a challenge to the case, AP reported Wednesday.

I'm almost speechless--almost. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres, File)

Goldman rushed to Brazil earlier this week, hoping to bring home the son who has become the center of an ongoing custody dispute and debate over whether Brazilian courts or international law can determine what's best for the child, AP reported. Instead, Goldman may be heading home to New Jersey like he has many times during these last four years of trying to get his son back from his ex-wife's husband.

"This isn't good, this isn't good at all," Goldman told NBC's Today show Wednesday. "He's got to come home with me. He is in a very unhealthy environment and this has to stop."

Both sides in the multiyear custody fight say they want what's best for 9-year-old Sean Goldman. He's been living in Brazil since 2004, when his Brazilian mother, Bruna, took (kidnapped) him on vacation to visit her relatives and never returned. She divorced David Goldman in Brazil and married Rio de Janeiro lawyer Joao Paulo Lins e Silva. She died last year of complications from the birth of another child, and Sean has been living with his stepfather.

Goldman's attorney, Patricia Apy, says Sean's Brazilian relatives blocked a court-ordered visit he had scheduled with his son for Wednesday, AP reported.

Apy says they were told the boy was too traumatized by the ongoing controversy, which has garnered international headlines and reached the highest levels of the Brazilian and U.S. governments, according to the report.

"David is extremely reluctant to attempt to force access when he knows the histrionics that these people are subjecting him to," Apy said.

Sean's Brazilian relatives, and the group behind the latest supreme court challenge, counter that removing the boy from the environment he has lived in since he was 4 years old would traumatize him the most, AP reported.

The case took on international diplomatic overtones this spring when the U.S. Congress called on Brazil to permit the boy's return. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton made the same request and President Barack Obama discussed the matter with Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva when he visited Washington earlier this year, according to the report.

The so-called Brazilian relatives reportedly are gangsters with connections in the media, which they blocked from covering the story, and the courts. So there is no way for Goldman to obtain justice there.

Obama, Clinton, the U.S. Congress...and Brazil still won't return son to father? How much in aid and loans have we given that country? Hmm.

It's time for a dose of CIA...or some Voodoo, if you ask me.

Source: Me, The Associated Press
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