It was revealed on Friday that United States scientists traveled to Guatemala in the 1940s and injected ‘prostitutes, soldiers, prisoners and the mentally ill’, without their consent, with syphilis and gonorrhea. Not surprisingly, the people of that nation are outraged and U.S. officials at the very highest levels are expressing apologies.
This morning’s editorial in Guatemala’s Siglo Vientiuno struggles to describe the enormity of what Guatemala President Alvaro Colom called a ‘crime against humanity.’ The Siglo Vientiuno editorial says in part:
There seems to be no proper epithet to describe the experiments that the United States, between 1946 and 1948, performed on 1,500 Guatemalans, who were infected with injections of syphilis and gonorrhea without their consent.
Perhaps the adjective “crime against humanity,” utilized by President Alvaro Colom when asked for his opinion on the subject, barely touches on the seriousness, albeit still imprecisely, of such aberrant facts as the U.S. revealed yesterday.
Now the qualifications and apologies abound, and although the facts of the case arose 64 years ago, the dignity of the Guatemalan people has been stained and their honor trampled upon. This is not likely to be remedied, despite all of the joint committees for uncovering what happened.
Although pondering the possibility of compensation is certainly fitting, it would be far more desirable that acts of this nature never occur again.
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