Comprachikos

For a Pendulum song, see Immersion

Komprachikos or kompepekanos (from the Spanish comprachicos , lit. - "buyers of children") is the term that Victor Hugo in the novel "The Man Who Laughs " (1869) christened the criminal community of child traffickers ^[1] .

In the first chapters of the novel, Hugo sets out the idea that comprachicos in Europe of the 17th-18th centuries bought children, deliberately disfigured their appearance, and then resold them as jesters , acrobats , court dwarfs , castrati singers and the like, or used as beggars ^[2] . He compares this phenomenon with the bandaging of the feet of girls in the Chinese.

The existence of the phenomenon described by Hugo is not a reliably established historical fact ^[3] , although isolated cases surfaced at different times in the criminal chronicle of European countries ^[4] . It is alleged that St. Vincent de Paul saved the boy from the hands of the comprachicos and that mothers in northern Spain in the old days were frightened by naughty children by the arrival of the comprachicos ^[5] .

The description of child traffickers in the Hugo novel made a big impression on European readers. Ayn Rand used the term “ comprachicos of the mind ” to refer to the “ new left ”, educational progressivism, and teachers ^{[6] [7]} .