From late 2005, when our first appeals were filed, my attorneys went back and forth with the kidnappers’ attorneys, trying to arrange for any reasonable conditions for parental access, including a mutually agreed upon location where I could visit Sean, even if it meant going to a neutral country or doing so in a non-Hague country, a nation that had not signed the Hague Convention. They would throw something out and we would say, “Okay.” Then they would say, “No.” At other times, they would present a potential location and say, “We want you to meet with Sean here.” “Yes, I’ll go anywhere, under any circumstances,” I would say. “I want to be with my boy.” Then they’d say, “No.” Or they wouldn’t return calls, and the process would simply stop, or they would return to the demand that I come to Brazil. I jumped at every potential opportunity they dangled in front of me, only to have the chance to see Sean snatched away again and again. Inevitably, every obsequious inch I budged in their direction was met with new conditions for visitation that included their hardened demands that I give up my fight to regain my son.
