How they see us: Guatemalans as medical guinea pigs

“Crime against humanity” is an understatement, said Siglo XXI in an editorial. While researching the infamous episode in which black Americans recruited for a Tuskegee Institute study went intentionally untreated for syphilis, professor Susan Reverby of Wellesley College found that one of the doctors involved had previously performed even worse experiments in Guatemala. In the 1940s, some 1,500 Guatemalans—prostitutes, soldiers, prisoners, and the mentally disabled—were “deliberately infected” with syphilis and gonorrhea to test new ways of preventing sexually transmitted diseases. Prison inmates were encouraged to have sex with syphilitic prostitutes. When too few of them contracted the disease, researchers created abrasions on their skin and introduced the germs that way. This was an “unconscionable involuntary use of Guatemalans as medical subjects.”

President Obama at least recognizes the magnitude of the crime, said Prensa Libre. In a phone call to Guatemalan President Álvaro Colom, Obama apologized on behalf of the American people. But we’d like to see “additional programs of assistance and aid.” After all, it’s no accident that the U.S. chose Guatemala as the site of its nefarious research. The National Institutes of Health–funded experiment ran from 1946 to 1948, at a time when Guatemala had just “ideologically and socially rebelled against the U.S.,” by electing a socialist president. With America engulfed in its Cold War crusade against communism, what better people to experiment on than unruly socialists? The government of Juan José Arévalo, a dedicated humanist, was “undoubtedly innocent of involvement in this grisly project.”

If only that were true, said La Hora. Given that those infected were soldiers, prisoners, and the mentally disabled, we can assume that the ministers of health, the interior, and defense “would have known of the matter.” The American professor who discovered the documents says that the Guatemalan government backed the studies on condition that the researchers test and treat the Guatemalan army for venereal disease. And the study was funded not only by the U.S. but also by the Pan American Health Organization, of which Guatemala was a member. “Obviously the U.S. bears a huge responsibility” for this outrage—“but so do the Guatemalans.”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Our outrage “goes in two directions,” said Juan Luis Font in El Periódico. First, anger toward the U.S. for treating Guatemala with such contempt. Second, anger at ourselves for allowing it. “How, how, how could a government like that of Juan José Arévalo ignore these experiments?” There’s a lesson here for today’s Guatemala. Aren’t we just as “submissive to the U.S. today”? We take pains to protect the identity of U.S. drug agents, while our own policemen are on the front lines in the war on drug cartels. Just as in the 1940s, the Americans are doing the research, “but we are providing the bodies.”