Continuing with our coverage of the U.S. syphilis experiments from the Guatemalan side, now that it has been revealed that the United States performed the deadly research in the 1940s, columnist Dina Fernandez of Guatemala’s El Periodico writes that regardless of the righteous indignation that the people in her country feel toward their ‘neighbors to the north,’ Guatemalans must take responsibility for the fact that their nation is so backward, it continues to lack a system of laws capable of protecting the citizenry from this type of predation.
Depicting a country in absolute social shambles, for El Periodico, Dina Fernandez writes in small part:
It’s aberrant. While the government of the United States was busy prosecuting Nazis at the Nuremberg Trials for atrocities committed during the Second World War, the American Mengele, a Dr. John C. Cutler, was devoted to injecting soldiers, prisoners and prostitutes in Guatemala with syphilis and gonorrhea to investigate the effectiveness of penicillin.
We may waste many a long hour hurling every derogatory epithet in the dictionary at our northern neighbors. But if we decide to occupy our time in this fashion, it is to be hoped that the exercise will serve to train us to discuss our responsibilities with the same zeal.
Why did these global swine have to choose our country to carry out such gruesome cruelty? Why avail themselves of the luxury of experimenting on Guatemalans, instead of buying a couple of white mice? Because we ourselves created the context.
We have no law or rules. Violence is the great structural basis for how we order our lives and create relationships, from the cradle to the workplace, right into the bedroom. We complain about the thugs who populate our streets, but the only solution we can come up with and suggest is death.
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