The AFU and Urban Legend Archive
Medical
Organ Theft
 organ theft origins




From: iayork@panix.com (Ian A. York)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
Subject: "Organ snatcher" myth URL
Date: 13 Jan 1998 11:47:20 -0500

<http://pc1502.geographie.uni-regensburg.de/html/p_burger.htm>

"Peter Burger is a freelance writer and collector of contemporary legends.

Last revision: January 1997. Earlier versions of this article appeared in the Dutch magazine Skepter (September 1995) and in the English magazine Magonia (June 1996). In 1997 Veronique Campion-Vincent published her excellent book-length treatment of the organ theft legend and all its ramifications: La legende des vols d'organes. Paris, Les Belles Lettres; ISBN 2-251-44093-3. Thanks are due to Veronique Campion-Vincent, Todd Leventhal and Eduardo Mackenzie, who were very generous in sharing their opinions and research materials."

The article covers many of the points in the AFU archive, and has some interesting comments on the legend as a legend, including but not limited to:

So, where do these stories come from? How did Jeison's and Pedro Reggi's family come to believe that their relative's blindness was caused by thieves? Apparently, these stories have not been inspired by actual crimes. So, could they be leftist propaganda, spread by deceitful journalists, as the US Information Agency has repeatedly suggested? In its most recent report on The Child Organ Trafficking Rumor (December 1994), the USIA does not come down as hard on 'Soviet front groups' as it used to; it provides much useful information but still does not explain the phenomenon.

Both parties - humanitarian believers and US government skeptics, but most of all the believers - underestimate the power of the people themselves to develop and circulate unofficial explanations as a reaction to actual circumstances and tensions. In other words: they underestimate their ability to create rumours. These stories originated in Latin American cities, not in a communist era Russian ministry.

The most detailed study of these rumours has been undertaken by Parisian folklorist Veronique Campion-Vincent. Campion-Vincent, who has been monitoring the organ theft rumour for years, maintains that it is much more than cynical propaganda. Rather, the rumour is the unreal synthesis of two real consequences of the poverty that afflicts Latin America: adoption and organ traffic. [15]

Children from Latin American countries are much in demand on the adoption market. At the time of the attacks on American tourists in Guatemala, on average 20 children per week were adopted from that country, half of which by Americans. Not all requests by American and European couples for the adoption of a Latin American child are met by legal means. Documents are forged, mothers sell their babies and even kidnappings occur. Clandestine foster homes do exist and are frequently discovered by the authorities. The people themselves regard this children's exodus with mixed feelings: what will the future of these children be like? Do they not rather belong in their own country?

As we have seen, the selling of bodyparts belongs to the reality of third world countries too. Rumours about organ theft, says Campion-Vincent, posit an imaginary connection between the two phenomena: according to the rumour, the adoptions serve the organ trade as well.

A third fact of life in Latin America that feeds the rumour is the high level of everyday violence, vividly described by anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes in a chilling chapter of her book Death without weeping. [16] Scheper-Hughes shared the life of the poor in a community in Northeast Brazil, a region where 'disappearing' is a frightful and by no means imaginary way of departing this world. The anonymous bodies of the victims may turn up on the side of the road, their genitals cut off and their eyes plucked out. Violence is such a routine feature of the world these people live in, that they cannot even take ownership of their own body for granted. And so, starting in the mid-1980's, the anxieties of the poor produced rumours of organ traffic. 

        It was said that the teaching hospitals of Recife and the large
        medical centers throughout Brazil were engaged in an active
        traffic in body parts, a traffic with international dimensions.
        Shantytown residents reported multiple sightings of large blue or
        yellow vans, driven by foreign agents (usually North American or
        Japanese), who were said to patrol poor neighborhoods looking for
        small stray children whom the drivers mistakenly believed no one
        in the overpopulated slums and shantytowns would ever miss. [17]

According to Scheper-Hughes, inhabitants of the First and Thirld World hold incompatible views of organ donation: 

        While Western Europeans and Northern Americans persist in thinking
        of organ transplants as 'gifts' donated freely by loving and
        altruistic people, to the people of the Alto, whose bodies are so
        routinely preyed on by the wealthy and the powerful (in economic and
        symbolic exchanges that have international dimensions), the organ
        transplant implies less a gift than a commodity. [...]

        The Brazilian rumors express poor people's perceptions, grounded in
        an economic and biotechnomedical reality, that their bodies and
        the bodies of their children may be worth more dead than alive to
        the rich and the powerful. [18]

These feelings of powerlessness in the face of ruthless exploitation predate the introduction of transplant surgery. In fact, stories of white killers stalking poor South Americans for their bodyparts fit a native tradition which already existed long before adoption and transplantation became important issues. One of the white ogres that abound in these traditional legends is the 'pishtaco' of the Andean Indians, a night prowler who collects human fat. [19] He sells his booty to factories (as a lubricant) or to pharmaceutical companies (as a basis for medication). Indian fat was also said to be used to start up jet engines. The monsters have kept up with the times and are presently hunting for corneas and kidneys.

--

Ian York (iayork@panix.com) <http://www.panix.com/~iayork/> "-but as he was a York, I am rather inclined to suppose him a very respectable Man." -Jane Austen, The History of England


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