14 May 2004
Lisbon — The Brazilian lay missionary Maria Elilda dos Santos is continuing to spread her gory tales of trafficking in human body parts in northern Mozambique, this time from the Portuguese capital, Lisbon, where she can be sure of a sympathetic hearing from right-wing forces who have always been hostile to Mozambique.
Although dos Santos has been exposed as a fraud in Mozambique, notably by an extensive investigation undertaken by the weekly paper "Savana", gullible Portuguese journalists are prepared to swallow her fantastic stories.
Elilda dos Santos gave a Lisbon press conference on Thursday at which she repeated her attacks on the Mozambican authorities and libellous claims against "the South African couple" (investors Gary O'Connor and Tanja Skytte) whom she accused of "heading a mafia-like gang".
This gang, she claimed, "is continuing to traffic in children and in body parts in Nampula and throughout the country".
She offered no evidence for these claims, and falsely stated that exhumations of bodies had shown that organs were missing. In fact, work carried out by a team from the Attorney-General's Office, and including Mozambique's top forensic doctor, in February reached exactly the opposite conclusion - that there were no signs that any parts had been cut out of the bodies exhumed.
Elilda dos Santos continues to insist that body parts are being trafficked for medical purposes. "The traffic could have various causes including scientific ones and transplants", she said. "I don't know whether the organs are destined for withcraft in South Africa".
But it is completely impossible to remove human organs for transplant purposes by murdering people and cutting them up underneath Nampula cashew trees. Such operations (as in the recently discovered illicit traffic in kidneys between Brazil and South Africa) require sophisticated medical procedures, and cold storage equipment to prevent the organs from deteriorating.
As for witchcraft - why would a sorcerer in South Africa look for human organs in northern Mozambique, when there are plenty of victims on his own doorstep ? Those well-documented cases of grisly mutilations in Mozambique (such as the recent removal of sexual organs from a woman murdered in Mecuburi district) have been for use in local rituals, not for export to South Africa.
Elilda dos Santos accused the Mozambican authorities, particularly the Nampula provincial government, of inertia and unwillingess to act. She claimed that she had been "pressured to leave Mozambique", and that an attempt had been made on her life.
In the real world, there has been no expulsion order against Elilda dos Santos, and the main victims of her paranoid plotting, O'Connor and Skytte, wanted her to stay so that she could be sued for libel.
Dos Santos is now planning to take her stories to the European parliament in Brussels, where she has the backing of certain Portuguese euro-deputies.
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