c. 2008 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Is trafficking in human organs an urban legend? In 2005, the U.S. Information Agency said yes, and published a white paper saying it just wasn’t possible to buy and sell human organs for transplant, especially those stolen from babies and small children.

Yet early last year, the English-language Arabic newspaper, Asharq Alawsat, said as many as 1 million children had been kidnapped in the previous 20 years, many for just that purpose. Their eyes would sell for $10,000; a heart for $50,000.

Whom to believe?

Organ Watch, a California nonprofit, says Brazil was once one of the leading places for stolen baby parts.

Not too long ago, I saw a filthy homeless woman in Sao Paulo wandering along a dirty street, screaming out her anger, holding her fingers in her ears. What is it she cannot stand to hear? What is she forcing from her memory? What does she know?

I heard a story about a small group of street children in Vitoria, Brazil, just up the coast from Rio, who disappeared for a few days and came back with tiny scars. They got progressively weaker, and then they died. No doctor could help them.

Did some doctor hurt them?

Lately, the Associated Press has been following the story of Dr. Amit Kumar. When police arrested the doctor in a posh Nepal resort in early February, he had $230,000 cash and a $24,000 check in his baggage. His wife and two sons were at home in Canada. His legacy was in a New Delhi suburb, where it seems he stole kidneys from the poor and sold them to the rich.

You read that correctly. Kumar is charged with performing hundreds of illegal kidney transplants. His transplants-for-sale ring included four doctors and 24 nurses and paramedics. Indian authorities who raided his clinic in late January had been chasing him since 1993. They missed him then, but Interpol got him. He is wanted on charges in five Indian states and in Canada. He’s now back in India.

Kumar’s story is very real. They have the evidence to prove it. He was buying or stealing kidneys _ mostly from poor laborers who say they went to his clinic for a blood test to get work. There are YouTube videos of poor men still recovering from his crude surgeries.

This isn’t just happening in India. There are reports of human organ trafficking in almost every country that has an unaccountable poor population. Medical tourism seems especially possible in Brazil, South Africa, and India. Apparently, several thousand dollars can move a patient to the top of the official transplant waiting list. A few thousand more can buy a “private” transplant right away.

Of course, too many officials still say none of this true. It’s urban legend, an international slander. But the United Nations knows it’s possible. They’ve defined human trafficking _ a combination of exploitation and money. A lot of money.

For the U.N., trafficking includes all manner of forced labor (whether as slaves or prostitutes) where money changes hands. That means selling people whole, sometimes for their parts, and includes cutting out an eye or kidney to sell in a clandestine market.

I do not know what caused the suffering of that woman in the center of Sao Paulo, or what memories she begged not to see in the window of her mind. But then again, I don’t know how many kidneys she has, or where her children are.

(Phyllis Zagano is senior research associate-in-residence at Hofstra University and author of several books in Catholic Studies.)

KRE/CM END ZAGANO600 words

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