The U.S.'s Tragic Role in Guatemala and a Chance to Make Amends

[Judi Lynn]

The U.S.'s Tragic Role in Guatemala and a Chance to Make Amends
Dan Kovalik
Posted: 04/17/2012 2:13 pm

One would think that the U.S. had it in for Guatemala and its people. As most know, the U.S. was behind a coup in 1954 that brought down the democratically-elected President Jacobo Arbenz. The U.S. then installed a military dictatorship that, with U.S. support, lasted through the 1980s. With lethal assistance from the U.S., that military regime killed around 200,000 civilians.

If that were not bad enough, it has recently been revealed that from 1946 through at least 1953, the U.S. "Public Health Service" (hereinafter, "PHS&quot engaged in the systematic and deadly experimentation upon thousands of Guatemalans without their knowledge or consent. As a 2011 Report by the U.S. Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues confirmed, the PHS conducted highly invasive medical tests on Guatemalan citizens drawn from penitentiaries, the national orphanage, state-run schools and rural communities, the military, a leprosarium, a mental institution, and hired commercial sex workers as a means to spread infection. In order to gain access to such vulnerable people, the U.S. researchers bribed Guatemalan institutions with essential supplies such as epilepsy medication for the mental asylum and malaria medication for the orphanage. The experimentation the PHS performed on these people included the following: deliberately infecting them with syphilis by scraping samples of infected pus and placing it on their genitalia or in their eyes; transferring gonorrhea from infected subjects to non-infected subjects; failing to provide treatment for contracted diseases; and various other medical procedures such as drawing blood and lumbar punctures to obtain cerebral fluid.

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The 2011 Presidential Bioethics Commission Report confirmed that the members of the U.S. medical team knew they were violating the rights of vulnerable populations in Guatemala and concluded that the experiments were a "reprehensible exploitation of our fellow human beings." President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius have publicly apologized for these crimes, which they described as "abhorrent research practices." Yet, as the Washington Post decried in a January 13, 2012 editorial, the U.S. government has failed to provide any compensation to those it harmed.

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If you find the U.S. response as appalling as the Washington Post and the signatories of the foregoing letter and want to add your voice to the call for just compensation of the Guatemalan victims, you can by signing the petition.

More:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-kovalik/the-united-states-and-guatemala_b_1431068.html