Mass. mom in Brazil: Custody dispute stranded me

BOSTON (AP) — Police in Brazil have seized passports belonging to a woman and her 6-year-old daughter, stranding them in South America for about a month amid an international custody dispute with the child's father.

Thirty-three-year-old Shauna Hadden and her daughter, Ava Machado, have been in Brazil since late May, when they began a trip Hadden said was intended to connect the girl with the father she hadn't seen in more than three years.

Hadden's mother, Linda, said Friday the pair had already arrived in Rio de Janeiro on her way to visit Ava's father, 32-year-old Donizete Machado, when her daughter received a phone call from a mutual friend warning her that Machado planned to keep the girl.

Instead of taking a flight to southern Brazil to meet Machado, Shauna Hadden and her daughter flew north to stay with friends in the northeastern city of Fortaleza, Linda Hadden said.

Then federal police seized Shauna Hadden's passport along with her daughter's in early June.

On Friday, a lawyer for Machado confirmed the passports were confiscated following a request by the girl's father but denied he wants custody of the girl, whom Hadden has had full custody of since the couple split in 2009.

Attorney Isabel Feijo said Machado sought seizure of their passports because Hadden skipped his scheduled meeting with Ava.

"He wants her to visit him and his family, and if the mother agrees to that, the request to seize the passport will immediately be withdrawn, we'll drop the case," Feijo said Friday.

Feijo said Hadden — using tickets purchased by her ex-husband — arrived in Rio de Janeiro on May 21 and was supposed to meet Machado in the city of Florianopolis before traveling together to the town of Criciuma, about 125 miles (200 kilometers) to the southeast.

When Hadden and her daughter failed to show, Feijo filed court papers on May 27 asking for their passports to be seized.

In court filings, Feijo alleged Hadden never intended to allow her daughter to see Machado and instead used the tickets to meet an online boyfriend.

Hadden's family called that claim ridiculous, but in an exchange of Facebook messages from April 16 — five weeks before her trip — Hadden voices an intention to visit the man named in the passport seizure request, a resident of the town where she's now staying.

Hadden's mother said she believes her daughter intended to visit her ex-husband because they had purchased gifts for his nieces and nephews that Shauna Hadden took with her. Linda Hadden said it's possible her daughter is dating the other man but he wasn't the sole reason for her trip.

Machado, who works as a house painter, had been expelled from the U.S. because he entered the country illegally through Mexico, his attorney confirmed.

Rafaela Santos Martins da Rosa, the federal judge overseeing the case, said she couldn't provide details because the case involves a minor and falls under secrecy laws. Brazil's federal police declined to comment. The U.S. Embassy in Brasilia would confirm only that Hadden is in Fortaleza and is receiving consular services.

U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Richard Neal, both of Massachusetts, say they've been trying to intervene in an effort to get mother and daughter back to the United States.

It's common in Brazil for officials to confiscate the passports of parents if a judge feels there is a chance that a mother or father may try to take a child out of the country without the other parent's permission.

This is not the first time that parents from Brazil and the United States have become embroiled in a custody dispute attracting international attention.

In 2009, a five-year custody battle involving a boy with family in New Jersey and Brazil ended with the 9-year-old Sean Goldman's return to the United States with his father David Goldman.

The case had pitted David Goldman against his son's Brazilian stepfather, who had cared for the boy after his mother died in childbirth. The boy's mother had brought him to her native Brazil for what was supposed to be a vacation, but she stayed before divorcing her son's father and remarrying. The boy's stepfather had temporary custody of him, before the conclusion of a case that strained relations between Brazil and the United States.

When the boy's handover was blocked shortly before the custody dispute ended, the U.S. Senate put a hold on a trade deal worth about $2.75 billion a year to Brazil. The dispute prompted high-level discussions involving President Barack Obama and his then-counterpart, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Shauna Hadden has a Facebook page called "Trapped in Brazil" that she is updating as she waits for the case to be resolved.

In an email to The Associated Press on Friday, she said she and her daughter are stressed and want to come home.

"Ava is tired and having a hard time," she said.

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Associated Press writers Mark Pratt in Boston, Stan Lehman in Sao Paulo and Marco Sibaja in Brasilia contributed to this report.

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Book 'em: Brazil cuts prison time for studies (AP)

SAO PAULO – Brazil is cutting prison terms for inmates who hit the books behind bars.

A law published Thursday in the official gazette says prisoners will get one day knocked off their sentences for every 12 hours in the classroom.

Justice Ministry spokesman Marcos Vinicius says it applies to all inmates regardless of the crime they have committed. The law also cuts prison sentences by one day for every three that inmates work behind bars or in work-release programs.

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Upwardly mobile in Brazil: Pedicures as a path from Rio slum to a mortgage (The Christian Science Monitor)

Rio de Janeiro – A paper cap corralling her long, curly hair and a white paper mask muffling the lilt of her salon gossip, Meire adjusts a neon ring of light and peers businesslike at the calloused foot of a client lying on a white leatherette recliner. Pedicures are serious business in this mecca of sun worship and sandals.

As lowly a job as it may seem to bathe, poke, pluck, and massage other people's feet, this job is golden. It has boosted Meire up the socioeconomic ladder and out of the slums: By serving the middle and upper classes in her cubicle at Ipanema's Spa do Pe (Foot Spa), she has herself entered Brazil's burgeoning middle class.

"I love what I do," she often says, as she straightens up from hunching over a client's newly buffed feet. And that's despite a three-hour round-trip bus commute to work five days a week – and frequent house-call detours she makes for extra cash.

IN PICTURES: The Rising Global Middle Class

Meire, who asked that the Monitor not use her real name for security reasons, is living the middle-class dream that is spreading across the globe. Her income – the equivalent of $1,000 a month – has enabled her to get a mortgage on a small house on a tree-lined street 15 minutes from her parents' home in the giant Jacarezinho favela, or slum. Brazil's middle class, swelling with people like her who have achieved higher levels of education than their parents, is now estimated to include half the nation's population of 191 million. The burgeoning consumer appetite, say economists, buffered the country from the world recession that began in 2008: Unlike the United States and much of Europe, Brazil's economy is booming, with 7.5 percent gross domestic product growth in 2010.

Thanks to a constitutional provision for universal education enacted in 1987, Meire got a high school diploma. She worked at a General Electric light bulb factory for six years after high school. But when incandescent bulbs lost market share, the factory closed. Meire's diploma saved her: It qualified her to take an 18-month specialized salon course.

"Brazilians are consuming more because they're working more, and they're working more because they went to school," says economist Marcelo Neri, who last year produced the Getulio Vargas Foundation study "The New Middle Class in Brazil: The Bright Side of the Poor." Mr. Neri adds that enrollment in technical schools such as the one where Meire got her training grew 75 percent from 2004 to 2010.

The favela where Meire grew up is famous for a section where drug addicts openly use crack, undisturbed. And security is hardly provided by police: She recalls how she and a companion awoke in a favela apartment four years ago surrounded by police who threw a packet of cocaine on their bed in a mistaken-identity extortion bid.

Her parents still live there, in a house of concrete rooms stacked atop each other in three stories, so close to a house across the alley that a neighbor can lean over and serve lemonade to visitors.

Even for those most determined to get ahead in life, favelas are full of pitfalls. Meire's first boyfriend, a cocaine addict, promised he'd stop using drugs if she had sex with him. She became pregnant at 16 – in 1994 – with her first daughter. But the boyfriend was killed in 2001 by a drug lord because his habit was leading to crimes that stirred up trouble for the community.

Despite being left alone in difficult circumstances, in November 2008 Meire performed some financial acrobatics and took out one of the Brazilian government's increasingly available low-cost 20-year loans to buy a 1930s-era yellow two-bedroom house with a front porch.

"My mother said 'You're crazy,' and I said 'You get things done if you're crazy,' " Meire recalls. " 'Otherwise I'll be here in Jacarezinho seeing the days go by.' "

Later, she made a sentimental discovery: The bungalow with its decorative stone chimney had been her mother's dream home. As a child, her mother had walked by it on the way to school, dreaming daily of it being hers. "She wept when she saw my new bedroom set," says Meire, who paid the equivalent of $47,000 for the home.

To realize her mother's dream a generation later and make her down payment, Meire withdrew the equivalent of $4,700 from her government-stipulated workers' fund account, and sold her furniture. She also had to prove to the bank providing the home loan that she had a hefty balance in her account. But after scrounging for the down payment, she didn't have a hefty balance. So friends shifted cash into her account to make it look that way.

This is what economists call "social capital." The fact that Brazilians turn mostly to family and friends for help is one of the fragilities of the new middle class. Analysts say government institutions need to be stronger, more reliable and accountable, offering greater access to microcredit and low-cost housing.

Meire's oldest daughter, now 16, was joined by a half sister, now 12. Thanks to their mom's determination and resourcefulness, both study at a private school and plan on college; they share a computer and regularly use the Internet. In summer, all three sleep in one air-conditioned bedroom.

It is a peaceful place Meire has made for her family. Though she leaves a bill unpaid each month to make ends meet, she says her financial scramble is nothing.

"In the favela you wake up in the night hearing shootouts," she sighs, stretched out one late-summer Sunday morning in her air-conditioned bedroom. "The peace of mind [here] is worth the cost."

SOUND OFF: Reinvention: How might your job history mimic this woman's?

IN PICTURES: The Rising Global Middle Class

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