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The organ trafficking business
A close-up of a television camera shows the mark of a recent surgery on the naked torso of a young Indonesian man. A few months ago, a similar story published by El Mundo newspaper revealed indications of the spread of a profitable business: illegal organ transplants.

"The only thing left is the scar. Almost all the money has been spent, and too fast. Only memories remain: how the trip began, or how [...] a neighbor returned home with some money after being away for a couple of weeks."

Thats how Ahmad, who lives at the refugee camp of Bagaa, Jordan "where some 130,000 Palestinians live crammed together-", assesses the consequences of trying "to get out of poverty."

Ahmad, who offered his kidney in exchange for almost $20,000 US, has managed to give a new course to his life, but says, "People at Bagaa look at me differently, with disdain. I look at my scar every night and I think: money comes and goes, but my kidney will never return."

In Jordan, news carries fast and many are anxious to tell new stories. There, people say that a waiter left the refugee camp and went to El Cairo hoping to sell his left eye for a cornea transplant. "He couldnt have saved the money he received in his entire life," several Palestinians told El Mundo.

Favorite candidates, reads the article, are those within the O positive blood group, which is the hardest to find. "A kidney may cost $50,000 US."

This type of black market is not the monopoly of the Middle East, although the Social Anthropology magazine published by the University of California points to Israel as the country with the most prolific "efforts behind the scene," according to El Mundo.

In some Asian regions, a large number of networks of a so-called body mafia have been detected. A few years ago, the Manila periphery served as a source for an organ negotiator, who managed to find, without any help, 150 "kidney vendors." In Europe, especially the rural areas of Rumania and Moldavia also harbor this practice. The destiny of some immigrants arriving to prosperous cities looking for jobs suddenly changes after contacting one of these intermediaries of illegal transplants.

Organs coming from corpses of poor people and that later on are exported to different countries, arrive every day to a South African "eye bank," reveals the magazine.

Thus, the supply and demand of the transplant business adapts itself to the course of globalization. A transnational is the ideal place to reproduce the scheme that begins in the Third World and ends in the First.

Its not by sheer chance then that Costa Rican clinics recently denounced what they consider "a shameful fact that violates the principle of medical ethics and morality."

In one of its paragraphs (item 30019010 of Annex 3.3), of the proposed US-Central American-Dominican Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR) establishes human bones, organs and tissue for transplants as merchandise subject to customs exemptions.

If CAFTA-DR is ratified, the barriers for organ trade would decrease, considered "tax-free export items", no surprise if we take into account that more than 70,000 people in the United States are waiting for organ donors every year.

What will the so-called pro-transplant organizations, surgeons and patients that have traditionally used poor people as a formula to save other peoples lives resort to?

The situation can be even more deplorable. Illegal organ transplants are also a business associated to violence.

A few years ago, a Brazilian magazine published an article on the sale of child organs. "Fattening houses" have been found in some Central American regions, in which desperate families leave their starving children in exchange for a few dollars so they can be better raised by wealthy families in rich countries.

This aberrant traffic has also become evident in India, Nepal, the Philippines, and Thailand. At present, organs are offered on the Internet, where you can find offers of hearts, livers, kidneys or corneas.

For the moment, laws seem to turn their backs on such acts, repeated in every corner of the world. As usual, the victims are found among the poor, defenseless and illiterate. Buyers know exactly where they can find their merchandise.

Source: By Deisy Francs Mexidor and Miriela Fernández Lozano, Granma

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