Content provided in partnership with

Organ theft narratives

Western Folklore, Winter 1997 by Veronique Campion-Vincent

Organ Thet Narratives*

Organ-theft narratives express a unified set of beliefs in organized criminal groups of organ traffickers who use kidnapping and murder, often of children and infants, to procure human organs for a vast network of medical professionals engaged in covert transplants that yield huge sums of money for both the criminal traffickers and the medical professionals. The narratives occur in three categories, baby parts, sacaojos, and stolen kidney.

More Articles of Interest: Truth and rumor on the organ trail - black market for organs used in transplants; The organ of last resort - harvesting and sale of organs practiced worldwide; Despite legislative ban, selling organs for transplantation continues to...; Bitter harvest: the organ-snatching urban legends - Urban Legends; Postmodern cannibalism - black market trade of human organs

1. Baby Parts. Many of these narratives relate alleged cases of large-scale criminal diversion of infants from the network of international adoption agencies. These texts, which first appeared in Latin America around 1985, have since spread to other parts of the globe and have spawned many rumors that have led to incriminatng accusations and passionate denials. An official controversy emerged when a motion "condemning the traffic in organs of Third World babies" was initiated by French Representative Danielle de March (affiliated with French Communist Party) and was adopted by the European Parliament by majority vote on 15 September 1988. This document reiterated accusations against the United States and Israel that had appeared in 1987 in popular media throughout Latin America when clandestine orphanages housing children to be adopted internationally (and often obtained by devious means, which included outright kidnapping) were dismantled in Honduras and Guatemala.

Israel did not react to the European Parliament's, action, but on 8 October 1988, the American Under Secretary of State Richard Schiffer wrote an official letter to Karel de Gutch, Chair of the European Parliament's Human Rights' Committee, protesting the Parliament's action (Campion-Vincent 1990). These official protests to the accusations have continued ever since to characterize American diplomacy. The United States Information Agency (USIA), which is linked to the State Department, continues to campaign vigorously against these accusations while eliciting denials from American authorities. From 1987 to 1996, Todd Leventhal, a USIA officer, identified himself openly with the fight against "The Baby Parts Myth" (Leventhal 1992) which he later designated as "The Child Organ Trafficking Rumor" (Leventhal 1994).

Narrative accounts of this alleged trafficking appeared in popular media of various countries from 1987. Then in 1992 a new variation occurred, when after the collapse of the Iron Curtain, the stories were set in eastern Europe. The emergence of a surge of international adoptions of eastern European orphans generated popular suspicion of the criminal diversion of children for their body parts; the rumors soon led to official action by several involved nations. Bulgaria, for example, required prospective foreign adoptive parents to pledge (by signing a form) that "I will not permit my child to be an organ donor nor allow the child to give organs or be a part of any medical experiment" (Leventhal 1994:6). Such actions were, above all, the result of beliefs in and tales about human body parts that arose from popular fears that were first elaborated in the media and then adopted by government authorities and other elite segments of society.

2. Sacaojos. A parallel belief tradition about organ theft from children became prevalent in Latin America in these same years. In documenting the criminal activities of alleged Sacaojos `eye thieves,' these beliefs provided the raw materials for authentic folk tales. A plethora of such stories soon were in circulation telling of the kidnapping and mutilation of children. They quickly assumed a mawkish-tragic tone in telling of the reappearance of a lost child, now mutilated, blind, or missing one kidney. In his pocket is an important or ridiculous sum of money and a scribbled note, e.g., "Thank you for your eyes." They are powerful horror stories in which the kidnappers are described as foreigners, dressed in black leather and armed with sub-machine guns, who suddenly pop out of big shiny black (red, blue, or yellow) cars or ambulances to kidnap children whom they later release with missing body parts. The stories were disseminated in press accounts of a single paragraph and often included the report that official inquiries were in progress, as was, for example, the case in Mexico in 1990 and 1992.

Some Sacaojos episodes, such as the Lima scare of November1983 which emptied schools for a few day in poor districts, have been studied by social scientists (Ansion 1989; Ansion and Sifuentes 1989; Degregori 1989; Rimachi 1989; Sifuentes 1989; Wachtel 1992). The pervasive fears in northeastern Brazil in the early 1980s has also been investigated by an anthropologist (Scheper-Hughes 1992).

The paranoid fears generated by these accounts have sometimes led to violent and tragic episodes. Riots and lynchings occurred in Guatemala in March 1994 after stories of Baby Parts and Sacaojos circulated. In separate episodes, two American women-tourists were attacked by mobs, and one who was lynched survived, but remains in a coma more than two years after the event. Not even visiting scientists and academics are above suspicion as was shown when a Swiss vulcanologist was lucky to escape with his life after he had been accused of kidnapping very young children (Mays and Ellis 1994; Shonder 1994; Sieveking 1994). A popular notion that the kidnappers attracted their young victims by dressing as clowns-who had earlier played a role in British and American child-abduction scares-has been popular in Central and South America since the mid-1990s. One such legend surfaced in Guatemala in April 1994, to which must be added a case in Carapicuiba, a poor suburb of Sao Paulo, Brazil in April 1995 and a case in Honduras in November, 1995. Such popular cultural media as films, television, and tabloids have contributed to the emergence of the demonic clown in popular beliefs and narratives. In the case of Honduras there was apparently an actual kidnapping of ten small children by a man dressed as a clown, an event that spawned a host of these legends. As a protest against the role of sinister clowns in kidnappings, sixty actual clowns publicly burned their clown-costumes in Tegucigalpa,Guatemala (Sieveking 1994), and a similar event was reported having occurred in Brazil (Newsweek 26 June 1995) and in Honduras (The Times 3 November 1995; The Independent on Sunday, 5 November 1995).

Organ theft narratives

Western Folklore, Winter 1997 by Veronique Campion-Vincent

Find Research Guides for:

Find Featured Titles for: Reference

Most Popular Articles in Arts

Most Popular Publications in Arts