Organ theft narratives

Western Folklore, Winter 1997 by Veronique Campion-Vincent

Although it is impossible with our present knowledge to determine the degree of accuracy of the denunciations that were presented in the documentary, one must also bear in mind that in a totalitarian system, the most extreme practices are at least imaginable.

I must confess to a certain personal malaise toward the denunciations. I fear that they do not target the main cases of abuse. Perhaps more important than the organ removals, are the frightening numbers of executions that are carried out every year. It has been estimated that as many as 1500 prisoners are executed in China every year (the exact figure is not published). This number, even for a country as populous as China, is huge. One should bear in mind that, in the United States, since the death penalty was re-established in 1976, there have been 330 penal executions. Even in the Soviet Union, another totalitarian state, human rights organizations estimate that there were, from 1960 until 1990, an average of 700 executions per year. In my opinion, human rights organization should target the huge number of executions in China every year as the most significant of the totalitarian abuses.

The decision to permit a condemned prisoner to donate his organs for use and thereby redeem himself had been implemented in another Chinese state (Taiwan) in the 1980s. However, these donations, which often entailed the dedication of a memorial plaque to the executed man's memory, have been discontinued after protests from the Western medical community.

In Latin America, where the criminal abuse of imprisoned criminals has also been documented, the authorities have added the homeless, bag-people, beggars and other street people to the list of victims, a practice that has reached grotesque and bizarre proportions since the early 1990s. The first case occurred in the Caribbean Colombian city of Barranquilla which has over 1 million inhabitants. The events began in February 1992 during the celebration of carnival. It was then that a garbage recycler named Oscar Rafael Hernandez appeared at a local police station with a harrowing story to tell. He claimed to have been lured on the street to the city's Free Medical University by a group of the school's guards who told him they had some cartons to sell. Once in the clinic he was severely beaten by his captors. Thinking him dead, the guards deposited him at the morgue. After he regained consciousness and escaped, he reported the incident to the police who then staged a raid at the university's morgue where they found a dying man and eleven recently murdered cadavers of homeless and destitute people. Four days later there were fifteen arrests of university guards and administrators. At their trial, the guards' chief admitted to fifty murders, but declared to have acted upon orders of the University's Rector who explained that bodies were needed for the students' practical exercises in anatomy. Although further investigation revealed that preserved anatomical parts and skeletons had been sold to other medical schools, the case was not retained by the judges because there was nothing illegal in this practice.