NEWSWEEK, International Edition, June 26, 1995 Too Good to Be True Tall Tales: Everyone's heard the heartbreaking stories about Third World kids being killed of their internal organs. Just one problem: they're false. There are some stories that are too good to be true. And then there are stories like the one that swept through Carapicuiba, a poor suburb to the west of Sao Paulo, Brazil that are so terrible that they are believed. It began in April when worried parents began to ring the local newspaper: what did the papers know about the gang - two men dressed as clowns and a woman dressed as a ballerina - that was luring children into a Volkswagen van, murdering them and carving out their vital organs for transplant into rich foreigners? Within days the tales grew wilder: the body snatchers were said to be using a half- naked blond woman to entice children. Eyewitnesses came forward: one woman claimed she knew of a school where a clown snatched a boy and delivered his body, minus a few organs, to his home the next day in a garbage bag. Sao Paulo’s newspapers leaped into the act. They jumped on the tale of infant Eduardo Feliciano Oliveira Jr., who had died suddenly at a local hospital. An autopsy revealed his eyes were missing and his abdomen stuffed with sawdust. Neither his parents nor their lawyer alleged he was killed for his organs - they suspect they were removed to cover up a possible medical malpractice - but the incident helped fuel the snatcher hysteria. Headlines like The Gang of Clowns Terrifies Schools splashed across front pages. And it was a great story, only lacking a few things: real names and real victims. For two months local police investigated the rumors without turning up so much as a red rubber nose. This was a lie and farce. These were poor and ignorant people, and we had to calm them, says Carapicuiba police chief Brasilio Machado. The story is preposterous, bunk, hokum. Murderous clowns? Fatal ballerinas? Wasn’t that on the old Avengers TV show? But it has been taken seriously by millions of people, and it’s only a matter of time before new rumors of kids being murdered so their organs can be sold in the United States pop up elsewhere. Since it was first reported, in 1987 in Honduras, this story has become unstoppable, an urban folk tale that now girdles the world. It has been heard throughout Latin America, India, the Philippines, Romania, Thailand, Puerto Rico and South Korea. With roots as ancient as the blood libel that medieval Christians used against Jews - and as modern as the movie Coma, the 1977 medical thriller, - this nonsense has sparked resolutions by the European Parliament and a U.N. inquiry as well as articles, two TV documentaries and at least one book. Terribly beaten: All it lacks is a single cold cadaver. A sophisticated person might regard this as funny - if it weren’t for the painful consequences of the body-parts myth in the real world. Innocent people have been beaten and maimed by enraged mobs who thought they were acting suspiciously around local children. In March 1994, an American woman, June Weinstock, was terribly beaten in Guatemala after a village woman accused here of trying to snatch her son; Weinstock is still incapacitated. The story has cost lives in other ways, too. Lifesaving organ donation - low to begin with throughout Latin America - have dropped even lower. And it has had a devastating effect on international adoptions, says Susan Cox, president of Holt Adoption Services in Oregon, one of the agencies that annually help place about 8,000 children with U.S. parents. In Turkey, officials outlawed foreign adoptions after the organ-thieves myth took hold. Tracing the trail of the rumor is like following a virus. Each twist and turn in its tortuous journey along the media food chain has been documented by both the U.S. Information Agency, in a 42-page paper by staff officer Todd Levental published last year, and separately by French folklorist Veroniqu Campion-Vincent. Their research shows how easily whispers of allegation can be transformed into pseudofact. The story began in January 1987, when Leonardo Villeda Bermudez, a former high official with the Honduran Committee for Social Welfare, mentioned the rumors in an interview in the local press, Bermudez shortly insisted he was misquoted, that he was referring to the rumors as rumors, but the fire was set. Local papers ran with the scoop without bothering to check it out, and the story was picked up by the Reuters wire. The following month it popped up in Guatemala. A few months later, in April, Pravada picked up the Honduras tale, conveniently ignoring the subsequent denials. (This was the cold war, remember?) It handed it off to Tass, the Soviet news agency, which distributed the story to left-leaning outlets all over the world. In Latin America, the Cubans eagerly spread the lie in order to discredit their ideological enemy to the north, according to the USIA. The rumor received a big push in 1988, when it was embraced by the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL). A nongovernmental organization accredited to the United Nations, the IADL has been described as a Soviet front group. It submitted tow reports to the United Nations that described the growing black market for transplant organs and demanded international action. The office of the secretary-general rejected both reports for lack of evidence. But in September, a French Communist member of the European Parliament cited the discredited IADL reports as the basis of a resolution condemning the nonexistent traffic; it passed. With the EP’s imprimatur, the story acquired official status. Pushed by Cuba, the World Health Organization drafted transplant guidelines that made the phony problem an official U.N. concern. Onward and onward, the rumor spun across the world. It grew with each retelling, becoming true because so many officials, authorities and recognized experts said it was so. Some might have had ideological axes to grind. Others, all too aware of the very real evils that prey on children in the world, apparently were ready to believe the worst about human nature. That may explain the behavior of Prof. Vitit Mantarbhorn, a noted Thai human rights advocate who has been an active defender of children’s rights in his homeland. In 1990, as a special rapporteur to the world body, he was commissioned by the U. N. Economic and Social Council to write a report on how children are exploited worldwide. His final report, released early last year, found mounting evidence of a market for children’s organs. His evidence? Vitit cites a story told by Nepalese police about children being trafficked into India. That’s it. No names. No details. No specific incidents. Vitit, who quit the United Nations shortly after the report was released, refused to be interviewed by NEWSWEEK. In a handwritten fax he asserted that the facts and findings on the ‘organs’ issue are to be found in the various U.N. reports submitted by me between 1990-1994. But Myriam Tebourbi, who collaborated on the report, says, We never had any real evidence. He had lots of allegations, but nothing concrete... We had no resources to mount our own investigation. Plenty of journalists also swallowed the myth whole, jettisoning or ignoring facts that get in the way of what is admittedly a compelling fable. Consider “The Body Parts Business, a British-Canadian TV documentary that has been broadcast in about 20 countries. It featured two purported victims of this terrible trade. One was Pedro Reggi of Argentina, who claimed on camera that his corneas had been removed while he was a patient at a mental hospital. Four days after the program was aired in Britain in November 1993, Reggi’s half brother told an Argentine TV interviewer that Pedro had actually lost his eyes as a result of infection while an infant. Medical records supported the half brother’s account. (In a French film, Organ Thieves, the mother of a 10 year old boy told a similar story; a subsequent investigation revealed that the child was also blinded by an infection.) The other purported victim, a Honduran boy who claimed to have escaped from the body snatchers uncut turned out to be a hoaxer, too. Judy Jackson, who produced The Body Parts Business, offers no apology for the lack of proof. It’s largely urban myth, word of mouth...You can never track it down, she told NEWSWEEK. Yet she is convinced that the organ trade is real and growing. In this world of mirrors, the fact that the U.S. government has officially refuted the story somehow is the best proof that a problem exists. Someone at a very high level clearly decided to deny it all, she says. No market: How do you prove a murder did not occur? That is the dilemma confronting doctors, public-health officials and adoption workers who have been vainly trying to contain the rumor. For starters, they point to the fact that organ sales are illegal in America. The entire U.S. transplant system is highly controlled by the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), which registers and tracks each donated organ. A black market for imported organs simply does not exist; for 18,000 transplants performed in the States last year, no more than 25 organs were imported - most of them from Canada. Moreover, the shelf life of human organs is measured in hours: as little as 4 for a heart, 48 to 72 for a kidney. You can’t just turn up with a kidney in a cooler and say to some hospital, ‘Hey, are you interested.’ says Joel Newman, a spokesman for the UNOS. But this rumor doesn’t listen to reason. After centuries of exploitation, many poor Latin Americans have no trouble believing that foreign criminals are out to snatch their kids. Folklorist Campion-Vincent may have uncovered another reason. Writing in a 1990 issue of Western Folklore, a journal of the California Folklore Society, she notes that though body snatching is a myth, illegal adoptions by wealthy foreigners are a real albeit small, problem. The body-parts rumor began to spread at the same time that illegal adoption rackets were uncovered in both Honduras and Guatemala; children of unknown origin were discovered in so-called fattening houses, from which they were sold to overseas couples. Adoption is still an alien concept in much of Latin America. The humanitarian impulse of the First World is totally misunderstood in the many countries where these rumors arise, says Bill Pierce, chairman of the Washington-based National Council for Adoption. In that culture it can be really impossible to understand why a couple of middle-class white Americans would want to adopt such a child. The ‘logical’ answer is that they must want to profit from the child in some way. It’s sometimes easier to imagine the evil within the human heart than to perceive the real mercy. Mark Frankel with John Barry in Washington, David Schrieberg in Sao Paulo and bureau reports