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Trafficking with the (Organs) Traffickers: Global Justice and the Traffic in Humans for Transplant
Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Chancellor’s Professor, Anthropology, UC Berkeley
Thursday, April 9,2009
4:30PM
Location: College Hall 200
What journalists benignly call ‘transplant tourism’ involves more than consenting individuals engaged in intimate bodily exchanges and backdoor transplants that are privately arranged. Each illicit transplant involves an extensive and highly organized criminal network of well-placed intermediaries with access to willing transplant surgeons, excellent public and private hospitals, laboratories, offshore bank accounts, police protection and even the tacit approval or blessing of government and/or health officials. Nonetheless, this is a dangerous game and the high risk players in the global ‘transplant mafia’, who think they are invincible and above the law, can suddenly find themselves shoved up against a wall and handcuffs slapped on their wrists. Surgeons have been pulled out of operating rooms, and transplant patients carried out on stretchers and taken to nearby public hospitals. In Durban, South Africa, the final trigger in a police sting of a private clinic at St. Augustine’s Hospital was the madcap escape down a back door of the clinic of a trafficked kidney donor for an Israeli transplant tourist. Most of the foreign kidney sellers were Brazilians (from the slums of Recife) and Moldovans ( from collapsed agricultural villages) who were recruited and trafficked to South Africa by transplant brokers. My paper, based on fieldwork in Recife, Durban, and Jerusalem, explores the following questions: What kind of moral worlds do kidney hunters and organs traffickers and their clients inhabit? How do they justify their actions? These intimate exchanges of life-giving body parts concern more than medical necessity and individual life-saving. In the case under study they entail complicated histories of debt peonage on the one hand (Brazil) , and of genocide, race hatred, and mass death (Israel) on the other. Gaddy Tauber, the Brazilian- based Israeli broker and bag man for this particular organs trafficking scheme far more was at stake then large sums of money. \Greed, yes, but also revenge, restitution and even reparation for the Holocaust played a role in these unconventional transnational transplant proceedings. Redemption, resurrection, and reparations on the one hand, organ stealing, blood libels, and seething resentment on the other make the global traffic in humans for organs a unique, unstable and particularly dangerous proposition, a political tragedy in the making of truly epic and Shakespearean dimensions.
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