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Organ theft narratives
Western Folklore, Winter 1997 by Veronique Campion-Vincent
I have already mentioned the case in Barranquilla where the "disappearances," that is, the murder of the homeless poor was evidently a thriving practice. Barranquilla, where the murderers were arrested, is, unfortunately, a rare exception. The practice of murdering the homeless has been all too common in some Latin American countries-especially in Colombia and Brazil since the mid 1980s. Perpetrated by policemen or by militias hired by shop owners, these murders are deemed "useful" by a vast sector the public, and thus go unpunished. Although these murders are tolerated they are not legal, and justice-seeking liberals and some human rights activists have called attention to these crimes through their protests. The result of their action is to drive the perpetrators underground so that their operations are now clandestine, a situation that produces a climate that favors rumors.
In the attempt to spread terror among the ranks of the vulnerable poor, the bodies of the murdered victims are often mutilated. Indeed, this mutilating of the corpses was already practiced during the Columbian violencia of the 1950s, but they are now often considered proof of organ theft but not in every instance. For example, even though the world has been made aware of the murders of street children in Brazil since the 1980s, the serious books describing the street children and the violence they endure do not posit a link between the murders and organ theft (Dimenstein 1991; Meunier 1977).
In the periods of the civil strife that have existed in many Latin American nations (Argentina in the 1970s and later in Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Colombia, and Brazil) the elimination of political enemies and protestors through their "disappearance" have touched large sections of the populations of these countries. Curiously, it has not been during these reigns of terror that there emerged the rumors and stories of Sacaojos and other organ thefts, but after the terror had ended and daily life was returning to normality. This fact means that there is not a direct correlation between political terror and the lore of organ thefts. In her book on the organ-theft rumors, the anthropologist, Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1992), attributes the phenomenon to the social inequality of the participant nations: "child-trafficking that accompanies international adoption, a non-egalitarian medical system that provided quality care only for the affluent, and the general exploitation of the poor throughout Latin America." It may be true that the wretched state of the poor worsened during the period of dissemination of the organ-theft lore, but even though this lore emerged first among these deprived peoples, it has since reached all social classes including the affluent who do not suffer from the same harsh conditions known to the poor, nor do they feel the same fears and insecurities. Moreover, organ theft lore is found in the most diverse of Latin American nations, large or small and with or without a sizeable "Indio" populations.
