Word: elie
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...nine-year-old Sean Goldman to his American father - even though international law clearly dictated that the boy should have been handed over when his mother, who had absconded to South America with the child five years ago, died last year. It sounds a lot like the case of Elián González, the six-year-old Cuban boy who, after washing up in Florida in 1999 after a boat disaster his mother did not survive, was for seven months kept from his father in Cuba by a string of outrageous and politically motivated U.S. court rulings...
...Sean Goldman case sounds so much like the Elián González case, in fact, that Brazil has opened itself to charges of especially egregious hypocrisy. It's no secret that Brazil, especially under hugely popular President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has become a hemispheric counterweight to the U.S. And it loves to play tit-for-tat with Washington. Because Washington still insists Brazilians secure a visa before entering the U.S., Brasilia makes Americans pay for a "reciprocal" permit to get into Brazil; after the U.S. started thumb-printing foreigners in immigration lines after 9/11...
...helped raise his son for four years. Most fathers would agree that losing the past five years after that - the first little-league games, reading lessons, trips to Disney World - would have been wrenching. It would have been as if Juan Miguel González had lost Elián for seven years instead of seven months...
...right thing last summer and ruled that Sean and David should be reunited. An appellate court upheld that ruling on Wednesday, and David flew to Rio on Thursday hoping to bring Sean back home for Christmas. But in a move that rivals the most disgraceful machinations of the Elián episode, Brazil's Supreme Court ruled as David arrived that the case requires further review. Now, the soonest the father can hope to be reunited with the son, if he can hope for that at all, is February...
...credit, Lula, like former U.S. President Bill Clinton 10 years ago, backs the father. But what's particularly striking is how Sean's case has been hijacked by local political influence in ways that recall Elián's. A decade ago in Miami it was the Cuban exile lobby, which saw in Eliancito a way to stick it to Fidel Castro. (One local judge, who ruled that Elián's Miami relatives should have custody of him, turned out to be a client of a powerful exile political broker pushing for Elián to remain...