Editor’s note: This article was first published in March 2013, during the crisis years in Spain. The 1,400% rise in kidney offers in Turkey, the €63,000-85,000 price of a kidney and the Spanish debt-to-income figures all date from then.
To get an idea of how suffocating credit card debt (and debt in general) can be, consider this: many people are willing to give up a kidney to pay what they owe. According to ABC.es, the number of kidneys offered for sale in Turkey has shot up by 1,400%. These people admit they are doing it to collect between €63,000 and €85,000, which is what a kidney fetches on the red market.
“If I kill myself, the debt will pass to my wife and children, so by selling my kidney we’ll be able to pay off what we owe.” That is the testimony of hundreds of people completely drowning in debt. And although we are talking about Turkey, the truth is that if some Spanish families were given the chance to sell a kidney, especially those about to be evicted, many would do it out of desperation. In fact, there have already been cases of suicide in Spain over the same problem: debt. In Spain, FACUA (a consumer rights association) raised the alarm when it noticed numerous cases of Spaniards willing to donate a kidney in exchange for a job.
Curiously, according to statistics, Spain far exceeds even Turkey when it comes to the ratio of debt to income. Roughly 15% of Spaniards have to pay more in debt each year than they will earn. A quarter of Spaniards put more than 90% of their salary towards paying off debts. And about 32% of Spaniards spend more than half their income on credit cards alone.
“Spain isn’t Greece, it isn’t Italy, it isn’t Turkey… but we’re starting to look so much like them…”
Meanwhile, the red market keeps growing
Some time ago we wrote an article about the red market, where organ-trafficking gangs are not a myth. They exist, although because of the crisis they no longer need to kidnap tourists: it is the tourists themselves who seek them out to negotiate the sale of parts of their bodies.
Blood speculators are a reality. In India, blood is paid at $25 per 473 millilitres. In the United States it can fetch more than $300, so some people buy blood in India and sell it in the United States.
Picking homeless people off the streets and housing them on farms where they get board and lodging on condition that they donate blood two or three times a week is also a reality, and it is legal, because these are government “poverty eradication” programmes.
The star product of the red market is the liver, which can sell for as much as €150,000. Many people consider giving up their liver, even if it costs them their lives, if it means financial security for their family.
Of course, the red market has an added problem: how many people would be willing to take a life to make €150,000 selling the organs, when in some countries people are killed for €100? But that is another story.
The crisis advances along with the interest on debt, and desperation among those in debt is rising dangerously, to the point of driving people to desperate decisions that, in many cases, they end up regretting every day for the rest of their lives.
Featured image: Museum of Veterinary Anatomy FMVZ USP / name of the photographer when stated, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
