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Vigilante Saves Kids From Parent Abduction

by Tom Henderson (Subscribe to Tom Henderson's posts) Nov 3rd 2009 4:06PM

Categories: Divorce & Custody, In The News, Weird But True

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Gustavo Zamora helps parents find their abducted kids. Credit: Nadya Labi, The Atlantic



A globe-trotting vigilante retrieves children from foreign countries? Why would you need one?

Say you marry someone and you have children. You get divorced. There's a custody battle. You win. Your ex-spouse refuses to accept the decision. He or she takes the children and flees overseas to a country that doesn't recognize your custody rights.

What do you do?

This is not a hypothetical question for thousands of parents who go through this exact scenario every year. Their options are limited.

One option, however, is Gus Zamora.

He goes to other countries and gets kids back -- one way or another. "There are lots of ways to recover a child," he said in an interview with ParentDish. "There's no one way."

The Tampa Bay, Fla., resident and former Army Ranger prefers to do things nice and legal. If he can work through a foreign court system, fine. Failing that, he might try to bully foreign officials with threats -- or at least bluffs -- of crushing media attention.

As a last resort, Zamora said, he will grab the child and run. "That's when you've run out of other options," he said.

Remember, these are children whose American parents have legal custody of them. Zamora said he reviews cases to make sure his clients are within their rights. The kidnapping parents can try to continue the custody battle. "But they're going to have to do it on American soil," he said.

Zamora is one of the few professionals who goes Rambo to get kids back. There might be others, he said, but not nearly as many as the dozens upon dozens of scam artists who say they can help parents, but end up doing nothing.

"The experts will come crawling out of the woodwork," he said, "but that's what they'll be doing, they'll be crawling."

Zamora has been getting kids out of foreign countries for 18 years. So far, he said, he has recovered 55 children.

And he is certainly more aggressive about it than more official channels. U.S. State Department officials don't like to meddle in international custody disputes, Zamora said. They have bigger diplomatic fish to fry and don't want to endanger other issues for the sake of what amounts to family conflicts. Nonetheless, Zamora said, it's amazing how many people come to him after hush-hush referrals from government types.

Other child-protection organizations offer little more than sympathy, Zamora said.

Not him. He offers action, which comes with a hefty price tag that varies from client to client. And he doesn't like clients who question his methods. "The client can be your worst enemy," he said in an interview this month in Atlantic Monthly.

Many foreign governments are notoriously indifferent to the custodial rights of American parents, Zamora said. One of them is Japan. Christopher Savoie of Franklin, Tn., found that out when he went to retrieve his children from his ex-wife and wound up in jail.

Japanese law almost universally favors the mother in child custody cases, regardless of circumstances. There's another factor involved in Savoie's case, Zamora said. "Japan is a real tough nut to crack," Zamora said. "They're racist and they don't care about anything except what they think are the interests of their own people."

Germany and France are also difficult, he said. "It's terrible, but that's the reality of it," he added.

Unfortunately, Zamora said, his business is booming as long as there are custody battles over international borders.

"I wish the system worked, but the fact that it doesn't work means I'll be working," he said on his Web site.

"It's kind of a shame."

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