Gerson & Cintia De Barros Canil Itanhandu Scams Trusting Americans Itanhandu Brazil

We are a couple in our 60's who decided to retire to Brazil. Our daughter accompanied us. We have been involved with the Brasilian breed of dog called Fila Brasileiro for over 20 yrs and met many wonderful Brasilian fanciers over the years. We met one couple named Gerson and Cintia Junqueira De Barros who owned a kennel in Itanhandu, MG and we struck up a great friendship. They agreed to help us move and get established in Brazil. Since Gerson was an attorney for the state of Minas Gerais his wife told us he would be able to do everything legally to get us moved and represent us. My husband came down to Minas Gerais and found a beautiful fazenda (farm), I flew down to look it over and also fell in love with the fazenda and we decided to purchase it. They told us we couldn't own property since we did not live in Brasil so they agreed to put the property in their names and they would sign it over to us once we moved to Brasil. We recently learned that this is not true, we could have owned property without Cintia or Gerson being involved. Our trusted attorney Gerson wrote up contracts, Cintia speaks English so she told us what the contracts said and had us sign them. Since Gerson was our attorney and they were such good friends we had no reason not to trust them. Obviously now we see the error of our ways, but at the time we were sure they were helping us and true friends.

We moved to Brazil and have been living in Brazil for 17 months we asked them to sign our farm over to us and they always had a reason why they couldn't do it. Now they have gone before the judge and told him THEY purchased the farm for themselves with money we loaned to them, interest free!! Gerson wrote up a rental agreement and Cintia, who had our power of attorney, signed it without us knowing a thing about it and since we didn't have a clue we were supposed to be paying rent on OUR own farm, they are asking the judge to evict us!!!

We are now caught up in the judicial system of a foreign country where we are not fluent in the language and we don't know the laws. We are in a fight for our own property that we have spent hundreds of thousands of hard earned dollars purchasing and improving. My husband is in ill health and this is very stressful for all of us. They also told many of the local business folks that they should charge us 2 to 3 times the amount things actually cost and then they wanted the kickback!! How can people be this callous and greedy?

We just thought this story needed to be told to protect other citizens thinking of emmigrating to Brazil so they would not make the same mistakes.

We are hoping for a good outcome,

Larry, Donna and Jaime

Donna valentine
Minas Gerais, Brasil
Brazil