La Libertad Avanza’s presidential candidate, Javier Milei, suggested “looking for market mechanisms to solve the problem” of lack of organ donors in a television interview Tuesday night.

“More than 350,000 people die per year, and by law, they are all potential donors. There are 7,500 people who are suffering, waiting for transplants. There is something wrong,” he argued in an interview with channel TN.

“If there are 350,000 donors by law, why don’t [organs] arrive: because there are people who benefit from that not happening”, he added.

Milei is a far-right libertarian economist and national deputy who has given a string of hotly controversial interviews promoting free market absolutism. In June 2022, he said that the sale of human organs was “just another market” that should be free from state regulation. He has also claimed that people are free to die of hunger.

Carlos Soratti, president of the National Institute for the Coordination of Ablation and Implantation (INCUCAI), the state organism regulating organ transplants, rejected Milei’s comments in a radio interview this morning. He said that only 35,000 of the people that die each year in Argentina meet the conditions to be donors. 

“And only a small percentage of those 35,000 could be used for donations,” he added.  

When asked if “he is in agreement with the sale of organs”, Milei avoided giving a concrete answer and pointed out: “What I am saying is that things do not work as they are”.

Milei has argued in the past that the market’s handling of organs for donation is about people’s right to decide over their bodies. 

“If liberalism is the unrestricted respect for the life of others, based on the principle of non-aggression and in defense of the right to life, freedom and property; and my first property is my body, then why shouldn’t I be able to do what I want with my body?” he said.