Originally Posted by
travellingpinoy
@NPF, I am really hoping that's the case. What's your confidence level in this? I know RafKa mentioned that his opinion was purely speculative. I am especially interested in the second half of your comment "11 years ago even the computer systems were different and not compatible with those used today".
@ RafKa, you present a pretty interesting perspective - especially #2. That could just create more work for them if they could even locate it.
travellingpinoy, what I said is, I believe, an "educated guess" - more than pure speculation, less than fact.
I have no inside information in this area, but having been through the exit controls several times each year in the past 20 years, I have noticed three distinct phases:
i) long ago, an even less than perfunctory control, where a Policia Federal officer would have looked at your passport (no checks, no computers) and just gave it back to you.
ii) beginning around 9/11 (2001), a period in which clerks (not Policia Federal officers) would look at your passport and sometimes (but not always), look something at a now existing computer
iii) for the last five/six years (no clear boundary in my mind), clerks who would systematically input something into a computer system.
My "educated guess" is that nothing remains on file (if there was something ever put there) prior to these last five/six years.