Brazil’s Trafficked Babies
Why is it so easy to take an infant out of the country?
JUNE 3, 2025
Santa Casa de Valinhos, a hospital in the Campinas region of Brazil, about 80 kilometers (50 miles) north of São Paulo, registered 77 births in the months of October and November 2023. Two of these births caught the attention of one of the hospital’s pediatricians, José Maria dos Santos Lopes Junior. The mothers were not from the Campinas region. They both left the hospital hours after giving birth and their babies, curiously, were registered as children of the same father: Márcio Mendes Rocha, a Portuguese businessman.
The first baby, Magda, was born on October 28 and was discharged a few hours later. The second, Evandro, came into the world 24 days later, but remained hospitalized owing to a heart problem. (To protect their identities, both children are referred to by pseudonyms.) During one of the father’s visits, the pediatrician decided to strike up a conversation. Rocha told him casually that “it’s very easy to get a surrogate mother” in Brazil. Lopes Junior decided to alert the hospital management, and on November 29, a hospital employee reported the case to the public prosecutor’s office in Valinhos.
The child and youth prosecutor who took on the case, Aline Moraes, started to investigate. She learned that the mothers of Magda and Evandro had both granted custody of their children to Rocha, and that Rocha always came to the hospital accompanied by a woman, Márcia de Godoy Honorio, who introduced herself as his secretary. The mothers had both given the hospital residential addresses linked to Honorio.
The prosecutor, suspecting that Rocha and Honorio could be buying babies to resell them, shared information about the case with the federal police, which continued the investigation. The immigration databases of Brazil’s airports showed that during the approximate period of the two children’s conception — between December 2022 and February 2023 — Rocha was not in Brazil, and neither of their mothers was abroad. If the data was correct, this would reinforce the evidence that the Portuguese businessman was not the biological father of either child.
These laws encourage pregnant women who can’t or don’t want to raise a child to arrange for foreigners to adopt their baby and then take the child out of the country.
On Monday, December 4, 2023, a couple of plainclothes officers stood at the reception of the Santa Casa hospital, waiting for Rocha, who was coming to visit Evandro. When he arrived at around 10 a.m., accompanied by Honorio, the police announced his preventive arrest on suspicion of international human trafficking for the purpose of illegal adoption. (Honorio had her cell phone seized but was not detained.) Other teams searched addresses related to Honorio and the two lawyers who had filed the custody cases for the babies. They seized $11,000 and 6,000 euros in cash from one of the lawyers’ safes.
Rocha had initially suggested to another couple of would-be parents that they adopt Evandro, but he rescinded the offer before the baby was born, saying his husband wanted to keep him. They had always planned to raise Magda as their own child. Because the couple were not planning to go through the legal adoption system, this would be illegal, and would qualify as human trafficking under Brazilian law.
For Estela Beraquet Costa, the federal police chief in Campinas, the case exposes the weakness of the laws and agencies aimed at combating international baby trafficking in Brazil. Abortion is illegal in the country, except in cases of rape, risk to the mother’s life or anencephaly of the fetus. Congress is currently discussing a bill that would prohibit abortion even in cases of rape. These laws encourage pregnant women who can’t or don’t want to raise a child to arrange for foreigners to adopt their baby and then take the child out of the country. “Márcio quickly realized how easy it is to illegally adopt a baby in Brazil and take them abroad,” Costa said.
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When Márcio Mendes Rocha, 50, first looked into adopting a child in Brazil, he was living with his husband, Hélder Filipe Carneiro Dias, in the Porto region of Portugal. Both are partners in a security company. On social media, the couple appeared to enjoy a comfortable life, with trips to North Africa, South America, Eastern Europe and the United Arab Emirates.
The couple met Márcia de Godoy Honorio, from São Paulo, in the early 2010s, through Wanderlaan Milanez Junior, a lawyer specializing in family law and bioethics. Milanez Junior had acted in the divorce of a gay couple in Brazil who employed Honorio as a cleaner. When Milanez Junior learned that Rocha and his partner were interested in having a child and were considering adopting in Brazil, he advised them not to join the adoption queue, claiming, according to an audio recording seized by the federal police, that it was “a lengthy process.” Instead, he proposed that Honorio, who had previously acted as a surrogate for other couples, could bear the Portuguese couple’s child. She accepted, but things didn’t go as planned.
In a message via WhatsApp, Rocha wrote to the pregnant woman: “I think we can help you. And I’ll be the father, which is a dream I’ve been trying for a few years now and haven’t managed yet. Everything will have to be done correctly. To be good for both of us.”
Honorio made three attempts at insemination with sperm from Rocha or his husband at an assisted reproduction clinic in Itaim Bibi, an upper-class neighborhood in São Paulo. None of them was successful. “The last time I had a miscarriage after five months of pregnancy,” she said, in a conversation in front of her home. Honorio, 42, is a slight woman with fair skin and blue eyes. She lives in a modest two-story house in a poor neighborhood in the city of Itatiba, in the Campinas region. She is tense and speaks quickly.
Honorio said that she felt guilty about not having been able to carry the pregnancy to term and that she started looking for babies offered openly on Facebook to make it up to the Portuguese couple. She denies any involvement in the crime of international baby trafficking.
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It is very easy to find groups on Facebook where women in Brazil offer their uterus for a surrogate pregnancy. When I typed in the words “surrogate motherhood,” I found 14 such groups, most of them with public access. Surrogacy is legal in Brazil, but no financial advantages can be offered to the woman who provides her uterus. This does not prevent women from offering to act as a surrogate in social media groups, and to receive money for doing so.
Brazil’s Federal Council of Medicine (CFM) recommends that the surrogate be the mother of at least one living child, be under 50 years old and be a relative up to the fourth degree of one of the partners. Otherwise, surrogacy can only occur with authorization from the Council. (This resolution does not have the force of law. It serves only to guide doctors.) The CFM was unable to say how many authorizations of this type it has granted in the last five years. “The lack of specific regulations for surrogate mothers contributes in part to baby trafficking, as many women in situations of socioeconomic vulnerability are forced to give up their uteruses in exchange for some benefit,” said Maria Lúcia Pinto Leal, coordinator of the Research Group on Violence, Trafficking and Sexual Exploitation of Children, Adolescents and Women at the University of Brasília.
In August 2023, while trying to find a baby for her Portuguese friends, Honorio joined a group on Facebook called “Bios and adopters.” There, she found a post from a 21-year-old girl who lived in a small house on the outskirts of Marabá, in the state of Pará. She was heavily pregnant with her third child and had decided to give up the baby. Honorio got the young woman’s phone number and passed it on to Rocha, who was in Portugal.
In a message via WhatsApp, Rocha wrote to the pregnant woman: “I think we can help you. And I’ll be the father, which is a dream I’ve been trying for a few years now and haven’t managed yet. Everything will have to be done correctly. To be good for both of us.”
“I’m afraid the baby will be born at any moment and I’m not in the condition for it,” said the woman.
“We can arrange the conditions. If you go to Márcia’s house, you won’t lack for anything,” he replied, meaning that Honorio would give the young woman all the support she needed during the final stages of her pregnancy.
During the negotiations, Rocha agreed to pay for the plane ticket from Marabá to Campinas, where the birth would take place, but he was unsure about the fact that the pregnant woman had not made any financial requests. He wrote:
“Excuse me for asking you this question. Don’t you want anything in return? I don’t like surprises, we are serious.”
On November 15, Rocha successfully obtained sole custody of Magda in court (the mother renounced her rights to the child). A day later, he flew with the baby, then just over two weeks old, to Portugal.
The woman only asked for payment for the flight back to Marabá and the amount corresponding to one month’s rent for the house where she lived with her mother and her two young children, aged three and two. She explained that she needed the rent because she would not be able to work during her postpartum recovery. “That’s all,” she added.
“But tell me a value,” Rocha insisted.
“Fifteen hundred,” she replied.
“I’ll give you 5,000, 1,500 is not enough.” (Five thousand reais is the equivalent of about $900.)
“Okay,” she said. “Then I’ll be able to recover without worrying.”
The arrangement was illegal. In a WhatsApp message, Rocha’s lawyer, Milanez Junior, nevertheless pledged to support him: “I always prefer the path that won’t cause you any problems, [but] if you choose and take any other path, I will help you in any way I can.” He advised Rocha not to allow the mother to breastfeed, because that would “create an emotional bond” between them. “The moment she leaves the hospital, put [the mother] on a plane and then you leave right away, you get it?”
On August 28, 2023, the young woman flew to Campinas. Rocha paid for the ticket, which cost 3,600 reais. Milanez Junior met her upon arrival at Viracopos Airport. “She really doesn’t want this child and she’s going to cooperate, so I don’t see any problem,” he said in an audio message to Rocha. The pregnant woman stayed at Honorio’s house in Itatiba; two months after her arrival, in October, she gave birth to Magda. Two weeks later, she returned to her home in Marabá.
On November 15, Rocha successfully obtained sole custody of Magda in court (the mother renounced her rights to the child). A day later, he flew with the baby, then just over two weeks old, to Portugal. Rocha had paid Honorio 3,000 euros (about 18,000 reais) for her help in finding him and his partner a baby; Honorio used the money to buy a car.
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In September 2023, a month before Magda was born, Rocha and Honorio began searching on social media for another mother interested in giving up her child. Their lawyer warned them: “Be careful, don’t get into it any deeper than you already are, this whole thing could get really bad.”
Rocha and Honorio ignored him. In October, while browsing Facebook, they found a 20-year-old woman, a resident of Paraisópolis, a favela in São Paulo, who was eight months pregnant. Once again, Honorio managed to convince the pregnant woman to have her baby at Santa Casa. The pregnant woman traveled to Valinhos, gave birth to Evandro, and six days later, left the hospital and the child. The police have not been able to locate her.
After the births of Magda and Evandro, and before Rocha’s arrest, Rocha and Honorio continued to negotiate with other pregnant women willing to give up their babies, according to conversations found by the police on their cell phones. Rocha didn’t plan to raise these babies as his own; they would be sold or given to others. The following exchange, found by the police, took place on Facebook in November 2023, between Honorio and a pregnant woman in Embu das Artes, a city in the Metropolitan Region of São Paulo:
“I’m from São Paulo and I would really like to meet you,” Honorio wrote. “And to have the opportunity to register the baby in my fiancé’s name.”
“I’m honestly looking for someone to help me eat, I haven’t eaten for three days. I’ll close with whoever helps me,” the woman replied.
The two arranged to meet a few days later, but the police investigation did not provide information on the outcome of the case.
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It wasn’t until 2016 that the Brazilian Penal Code made human trafficking, whether for the purposes of sexual exploitation, slave labor, organ trafficking or illegal adoption, punishable by a sentence of four to eight years in prison.
It is very easy to claim fatherhood in Brazil: A man can simply take a baby’s birth certificate to a civil registry office and claim to be the child’s biological father, without further proof. The practice, known as a “Brazilian adoption,” is common, and seen as a failure of the Brazilian judicial system.
In decades prior, thousands of babies were sent out of the country, sold to adoptive parents abroad. In the 1980s, a woman named Arlete Honorina Vitor Hilu housed unwanted babies in residential apartments in the city of Curitiba, in southern Brazil, where they were adopted by foreigners, many of whom traveled from Israel. (A travel agency in Israel sold tourist packages to Curitiba for $25,000, including the purchase of the baby.) Hilu was arrested twice for falsification of documents. In interviews, she claimed judges who processed the adoptions knew about the scheme and received part of the money.
In 1999, the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo revealed that Limiar, an NGO headquartered in the United States with branches in São Paulo and Curitiba, had a catalog of Brazilian children available for adoption by families in the U.S. “If Nelson Mandela were 12 years old, he would look like Marcelo,” read one description. “A normal, healthy boy. His smile melts your heart. Video available.” Limiar charged prospective parents $5,500 for its adoption brokerage services. In 2012, an investigation by the Brazilian Senate revealed that, over 20 years, Limiar had brokered the adoption of 1,700 children from Brazil to the U.S. and Canada.
There is still no accurate data on human trafficking in Brazil. In the last five years, the federal police have opened 120 investigations relating to the trafficking of babies — a number that doesn’t accurately reflect the scale of the problem, according to experts. It is very easy to claim fatherhood in Brazil: A man can simply take a baby’s birth certificate to a civil registry office and claim to be the child’s biological father, without further proof. The practice, known as a “Brazilian adoption,” is common, and seen as a failure of the Brazilian judicial system. In many cases, the birth mothers are extremely economically and socially vulnerable. For Pinto Leal, the researcher at the University of Brasília, this leads to significant underreporting. “Unfortunately, society does not always see baby trafficking as something harmful. In many cases, illegal adoption is disguised as charity.”
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In July 2024, Rocha was sentenced by the Brazilian courts to five years in prison for the crime of human trafficking for the purpose of illegal adoption. He is appealing the sentence.
For lawyer Rafael de Oliveira Laudisio, who is defending Rocha, this is a case of “Brazilian adoption.” “Despite it being classified as a crime by law, it is a widespread and well-known practice,” he said.
The lawyer claims that Rocha “has never trafficked people, nor is he the leader of a criminal organization with the objective of selling Brazilian babies in Europe. This is absurd beyond belief.” He also said that “under the guidance of a lawyer he trusted, he adopted illegally, but he never imagined that he would be committing the crime of human trafficking.”
Honorio and Milanez Junior, the lawyer, are still being investigated by the federal police in Brazil, as are Solange Pinheiro and Thaís dos Santos, the two lawyers who helped Rocha claim custody of Magda and Evandro. Honorio denied being a baby trafficker. “I just wanted to help Márcio have a child. I have never been a child trafficker.” In a joint statement, lawyers Solange Pinheiro and Thaís Santos said only that “all the necessary documents that prove our innocence have already been presented to the Federal Police, as well as judicially, and we are confident that everything will soon be clarified.” Milanez Junior did not respond to requests for comment.
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On December 6, 2023, two days after Rocha’s arrest at Santa Casa de Valinhos, the Portuguese authorities rescued one-month-old Magda from a house owned by Dias, Rocha’s husband, in Valongo, a city in the region of Porto. Despite having sheltered a baby trafficked from Brazil, Dias is not being investigated in Portugal. “I didn’t see any crime on [his] part. The baby was apparently very well looked after,” said Sebastião Sousa, the chief inspector of the Portuguese Judicial Police.
Authorities brought Magda to a shelter in the north of Portugal, where she waited for the completion of the legal procedures that would allow her to be brought back to Brazil. She returned to Brazil in March 2025, one year and four months after Rocha took her out of the country as a newborn, and was placed in foster care.
Evandro underwent heart surgery soon after his birth in November 2023. In March the following year, after three months in the hospital, he was adopted, with the approval of the courts, by a couple from the Campinas region who were duly registered on the adoption list.
Report carried out with the collaboration of Chagas Filho, from Marabá.
This article was originally published in Piauí magazine, Brazil.
PHOTO: via Freepik
✺ Published in “Issue 29: Fathers” of The Dial
