The US STD Experiments in Guatemala
Episode Description:
In 1946 the United States government immorally and unethically and, arguably illegally engaged in research experiments in which more than 5000 uninformed and unconsenting Guatemalan people were intentionally infected with bacteria that cause sexually transmitted diseases. Many have been left untreated to the present day. And although US President Barack Obama apologized in 2010, and although the US Presidential commission for the study of bioethical issues for the Guatemalan experiments was morally wrong, little if anything has been done to compensate the victims and their families.
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Cold Opening:
In 1946 the United States government immorally and unethically and, arguably illegally engaged in research experiments in which more than 5000 uninformed and unconsenting Guatemalan people were intentionally infected with bacteria that cause sexually transmitted diseases. Many have been left untreated to the present day. And although US President Barack Obama apologized in 2010, and although the US Presidential commission for the study of bioethical issues for the Guatemalan experiments was morally wrong, little if anything has been done to compensate the victims and their families.
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What is going on everyone? This is the LEO podcast… where we talk about various educational topics… especially those impacting the Latin American community.
During today’s episode, we’re going to discuss yet again how the United States has corrupted Guatemala. If you have yet to listen to episode #51 I highly recommend going back and listening to it after this one. In that episode we discuss the 1954 US-Led Coup in Guatemala over bananas… but todays episode is about…First, Do No Harm: The US Sexually Transmitted Disease Experiments in Guatemala, which have received little attention. All the information discussed in today’s episode is centered around an article by Doctor Michael A. Rodriguez and Robert García. We’ll be exploring the backdrop for this unethical medical research and violation of human rights and call for steps the United States should take to provide relief and compensation to Guatemala and its people as cited in this article.
I’m your host kevin muñoz, this is today’s free episode, if you want early access to episodes and bonus episodes you can find that right now on our patreon.com/latinamericaneo and if not then enjoy this one!
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Topic 1: Context of the study – The US STD Experiments in Guatemala
When this article was written back in 2013 Guatemala had a total population of 14.76 million people; 53.7% live in poverty, the average level of education was 4.1 years in 2011, and Guatemala is considered a lower-middle-income country. These numbers haven’t moved all that much throughout the years. But back in 1946, these demographic characteristics were a lot worse and this was without the benefit of more than 60 years of national, economic, and cultural development.
Knowing these inequalities in 1946 the Public Health Service investigators in a study funded by the National Institutes of Health, with the help of Guatemalan authorities, engaged in a series of immoral and unethical human medical experiments conducted without the participant’s informed consent.
This study involved 5,128 vulnerable people, including children, orphans, child and adult prostitutes, Guatemalan Indians, leprosy patients, mental patients, prisoners, and soldiers. Between 1946 and 1948, health officials intentionally infected at least 1,308 of these people with syphilis, gonorrhea, and chancroid and conducted serology tests on others which are blood tests that look for antibodies in your blood.
This study actually began in the United States but was moved to Guatemala when researchers were unable to consistently produce gonorrhea infections in prisoners at a Terre Haute, Indiana, prison.
The researchers systematically and repeatedly violated profoundly vulnerable individuals, some in the saddest and most despairing states, and grievously aggravated their suffering.
Take Berta as an example, and I will give a trigger warning before telling her story because it does get pretty intense so if you don’t like hearing about bodily fluids, blood, and eye stuff then just skip ahead like 3 minutes.
So “Berta was a female patient in the psychiatric hospital. Her age and illness that brought her to the hospital are unknown. In February 1948, Berta was injected in her left arm with syphilis. A month later, she developed scabies (an itchy skin infection caused by a mite). Several weeks later, [lead investigator Dr. John] Cutler noted that she had also developed red bumps where he had injected her arm, lesions on her arms and legs, and her skin was beginning to waste away from her body. Berta was not treated for syphilis until three months after her injection. Soon after, on August 23, Dr. Cutler wrote that Berta appeared as if she was going to die, but he did not specify why. That same day he put gonorrheal pus from another male subject into both of Berta’s eyes, as well as in her urethra and rectum. He also re-infected her with syphilis. Several days later, Berta’s eyes were filled with pus from gonorrhea, and she was bleeding from her urethra. On August 27, Berta died.”
Topic 2: Apology and reports issued – The US STD Experiments in Guatemala
In 2010, US President Barack Obama apologized to Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom and the people affected, expressing the United States’ commitment to the ethical and legal conduct of contemporary human medical studies. The US Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues has since issued 2 reports: “Ethically Impossible” STD Research in Guatemala from 1946-1948 and Moral Science: Protecting Participants in Human Subjects Research.
The reports recommended reforms, none of which have been implemented as of yet and there was no mention of reparation or compensation for the victims. There was also little said about the violations against human rights, which, when considered in conjunction with medical ethics, should provide protection to vulnerable populations.
The Guatemalan government also issues a separate report, Consentir el Daño: Experimentos Médicos de Estados Unidos en Guatemala (To Agree to the Harm: Medical Experiments by the United States in Guatemala), which went beyond the US reports to state that the experiments were “a crime against humanity” and that racism and discrimination were present throughout the experiments in an explicit and conscious way. The Guatemalan report called for reparation and compensation for the victims.
There were even 2 additional independent reports written by the United Nations and the Catholic Church on human rights violations and genocide in Guatemala from the 1950s to the 1990s. Despite these reports, there is little evidence that the US government, the public health community, academic publications, or the media have acknowledged the Guatemalan report.
Topic 3: 2012 Case against US government was considered – The US STD Experiments in Guatemala
In the spring of 2012, the case against the US government was considered by a federal district court as a class action lawsuit brought on behalf of the Guatemalan victims and their survivors. However, the court dismissed the case on grounds of sovereign immunity which refers to the fact that the government cannot be sued without its consent, which honestly to me sounds like the dumbest thing ever.
The court wrote that “the Guatemala Study is a deeply troubling chapter in our Nation’s history. Yet. . .this Court is powerless to provide any redress to the plaintiffs. The pleas are more appropriately directed to the political branches of our government, who, if they choose, have the ability to grant some modicum of relief to those affected by the Guatemala Study.”
But to date, the political branches have provided no relief to the plaintiffs. What the department of Health and Human Services did do on January 10, 2012, was announce the funding of approximately $1.8 million to improve the treatment and prevention of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in Guatemala and to further strengthen ethical training on human research protections.
However, General funding of global human research protections and STI health initiatives in Guatemala is no substitute for treatment of and compensation to the victims.
What’s even more startling is the lack of publicity received by the Guatemalan case. The media has devoted little attention to this case.
So to summarize, the US and Guatemalan commissions have documented many of the facts of the STD experiments and are in agreement on many principal points. Each report has determined that the Public Health Service investigators violated contemporaneous medical research ethics standards, and the Guatemalan report determined that the experiments violated human rights law. Given the state of the records, the few judicial precedents, the increasingly unreceptive attitude of the US Supreme Court toward class actions, and the complicated questions of sovereign immunity, the plaintiffs’ quest for access to justice through the courts will be long and uncertain.
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Topic 4: Unequal justice: Guatemala and Tuskegee – The US STD Experiments in Guatemala
Perhaps the closest comparison to this case is one you might have heard of before. The Tuskegee syphilis experiments. In both the Guatemala and the Tuskegee experiments, directed by the same principal investigator, the US government engaged in concededly immoral and unethical actions: conducting non-consensual human medical experiments, not treating infected victims, and deceiving victims and the public. In Guatemala, researchers intentionally infected the victims and generally left them without treatment or compensation for the remainder of their lives. In Tuskegee, the nearly 400 victims were already infected but were left without treatment beginning in the 1930s.
However, unlike the Guatemalan case, the United States eventually provided treatment and compensation for victims, families, and heirs in Tuskegee, including funding to locate the victims and pay attorneys fees. The ethical principle of equal justice strongly suggests that similar relief should be provided for Guatemalan victims. However, reparation in Tuskegee was made only after organizations championed the cause, made the wrongful acts known to the general public, sought access to justice through the courts, and applied pressure on the government to take action, and as I mentioned earlier this is something that has not occurred in the context of the Guatemalan STD experiments.
Topic 5: Reparations and compensation – The US STD Experiments in Guatemala
The authors of the Guatemalan report also articulated the principles of compensation and reparations, which remain valid and extend to the need to address legal issues. First, as a matter of corrective justice, surviving participants or their affected contacts should be compensated in full for injuries sustained. Surviving family members should also be made whole for harm incurred, whether direct (disease transmission) or indirect (emotional distress, loss of
a family member at a younger age).
Second, a compensation and reparations program would more concretely and permanently acknowledge the wrongful nature of the conduct in question, in keeping with the expressive function of both US and international law.
Third, compensation and reparations would advance healing and reconciliation and constitute an important, tangible, goodwill gesture to the Guatemalan people and nation.
Fourth, compensation and reparations could be tailored to enhance the legal and ethical training of current and future investigators, mitigating potential educational shortcomings and preventing future misconduct.
Finally, as a matter of deterrence, compensation and reparations may obviate legal and ethical violations in the future.
History has even provided a few models of compensation programs that the US response to Guatemala may do well to emulate. Here’s an example: in response to a class-action lawsuit ( Allen v United States), the US Congress passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act of 1990. As of October 2011, more than $1.5 billion had been disbursed to more than 23,000 approved claimants exposed to ionizing radiation during US-based nuclear experiments.
This is the type of compensation that is required to correct the injustices suffered by the Guatemalan people, not the mere $1.8 million set aside for prevention programs and ethical training on human research protection.
Another example would be the Tuskegee payment structure. $37,500 for each living participant, $15,000 for each surviving dependent, $16,000 for each living control group participant, $5,000 to heirs of deceased members of the control group for a total of $10 million in 1974 which is approximately $47 million in 2013 when this article was written. A similar payment structure applied to the Guatemalan victims would still be a relatively small amount in comparison with the $1.5 billion already awarded to the victims of radiation research.
Conclusion/Closing remarks: The US STD Experiments in Guatemala
To conclude today’s episode, it is critical to adopt legal and ethical reforms to provide treatment and compensation for individuals involved in improperly conducted human experiments, waive sovereign immunity for federally funded human research in the United States and abroad, and ensure that parallel protections apply to privately funded research, and respect autonomy and equality for all. Greater application of legal strategies may promote a stronger structural foundation for preventing such unethical acts in the future.
THE END
That’s all for today on the LEO podcast. I’m Kevin Muñoz and as always feel free to send me a message with your thoughts or with any interesting topic that you’d like to see covered.
and for those of you on Patreon, I’ll see you there.
Otherwise, I’ll see you all in next week’s episode!
