Hot Spots

Activity related to the organ trade around the world

Also see the photographic essay by Nancy Scheper-Hughes

Argentina

• Allegations of Organ Theft
  
  Between 1976-1991 at the state institute of mental health Montes de Oca (where many "insane" political dissidents were sent) some 1,321 patients died under mysterious circumstances and another 1,400 patients disappeared (the hospital explained to the families that they had "escaped"). Years later, when some of the bodies were exhumed, it was found that their eyes and other body parts had been removed (see V. Chaudhary: "Argentina uncovers patients killed for organs," British Medical Journal Vol 34, 25 of April 1992 pp 1073-1074). The judicial authorities discovered in Jan of 1992 that at the same hospital there was a traffic in blood taken by force from patients and the assassination of the sick for the use and sale of their organs, above all corneas.
  
  
  
• Organ sales and political violence
  
  During the Argentine "dirty war" (1976-1982) infants and small children of imprisoned dissidents were kidnapped and given as rewards to loyal childless military families (Suarez-Orozco, Marcelo. 1987. "The treatment of children in the dirty war: Ideology, state terrorism, and the abuse of children in Argentina," in Child Survival, Scheper-Hughes, ed. pp227-46). Older children were abducted by security officers, brutalized in detention, and then returned politically "transformed" to their relatives. Other children of suspected subversives were tortured in front of their parents, and some died in prison.