Here's what I have done. Probably should have put this in the original post.
also, the phone has been fine for the past few days picking up the TIM cell network.
- powered on and off several time.
- toggled the internation CDMA to on and off again. this was what VZ told us to do.
- Reset the network settings only - didn't try resetting everything. will do that but I don't have much faith and I think it might actually mess up the latest carrier update I received before leaving the country.
The phone is CDMA and GSM. Although with VZ you can't use GSM until you are totally out of the CDMA coverage. Brazil has no CDMA.
The support at VZ seems to think that the Brazilian carrier has sent an update or isn't doing something right.
Everywhere I look there seems to be solutions to select the carrier manually. As of the iOS4, this is supposed to be there. Verizon has either hidden it from me or TIM has done something to prevent me from roaming on their network. 😟