Costa Rica has cultivated a reputation as a medical tourism mecca. Patients come from all over the world to take advantage of the highly trained medical teams operating in Costa Rican hospitals, at prices often lower than in other countries. Now there’s a return of a problem first discovered in 2017: illegal organ trafficking.

The illegal organ trafficking business was first brought to light two years ago, when the former head of Nephrology at Angel Calderon Guardia Hospital, Dr. Francisco Jose Mora Palma, was accused and convicted of running an international ring of trafficked kidneys. Dr. Mora had apparently been running this ring since 2009, using both Calderon Guardia and Clinica Biblica for his surgeries, and selling them to organ brokers in Israel, Ukraine and various Eastern European countries. The person who recruited the kidney “donors” was a Greek Pizzeria owner by the name of Dimosthenis Karkasi. It was Karkasi’s job to identify and solicit “economically vulnerable” people willing to sell one of their kidneys for $20,000.

Costa Rica was the first Latin American country to sign on to an international treaty to combat human organ trafficking in 2018. Unfortunately, Costa Rica seems to have been unable to enforce the treaty, and this year a new organ trafficking ring was uncovered at Hospital Mexico in San Jose, a hospital operated by Caja Costarricense de Seguro Social, the national socialized medicine program. No arrests have been made yet, but authorities continue to investigate the hospital thoroughly.
The New York Times wrote about the alarming rise in Costa Rican organ trade explaining that “Costa Rican doctors had a financial incentive to treat foreign patients because of the country’s dual private/public medical system. Earning about $7,000 a month in state-run hospitals, nephrologists and transplant surgeons could earn much more performing transplants after hours at private hospitals.”

Sadly, there are often many poor people willing to go under the knife, knowing they will survive the procedure thanks to Costa Rica’s sophisticated medical care, and happy to make $20,000 they would usually need to work for years to earn. They often fail to understand that their kidneys are then sold abroad for at least $100,000, with doctors, nurses, organ importers, and recruiters all paid handsomely for their efforts. The demand for these organs is huge, with very little incentive to blow the whistle on these activities, which are usually consensual, with corruption at every level. India, Pakistan and China have the same organ traffic issues.

Luz Estella Ortiz-Nagale, a Colombian lawyer and human trafficking expert recently stated, “Costa Rica has evolved from a small player into an epicenter for illegal organ trafficking.”

According to health magazine BioEdge, “The organ traffic business came unstuck in 2012 when Ukranian police found a Costa Rican phone number among the contacts of two Ukranian organ brokers whom they arrested. When Costa Rican police investigated, they found that some kidneys were being “donated” to rich Israelis. Costa Rican donors were paid $18,000 in 2012, and were recruited often by other donors who were each paid $1,000 per kidney referral.

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