Latina Americans being used as medical guinea pigs for U.S. medical advancement isn’t the stuff of nightmares or science fiction. Look up for example how the birth control pill that many women claim as part of their liberation came to be.
Last week, the U.S. apologized for knowingly, purposely, and without consent infecting anywhere between 700 to over 1,00 Guatemalan prisoners of the CIA, mental patients, soldiers, sex workers and children in the 1940′s with sexually transmitted illnesses like syphilis and gonorrhea in order to test the effectiveness of antibiotics The experiments came to light five years ago, stumbled upon by a professor researching the Tuskegee syphilis study, where African -Americans were withheld treatment so that scientists could observe the progression of the illness, but were only just made public.

In the case of the recently revealed Guatemalan study, sex workers and pouring the germs onto skin abrasions made by the researchers were the means to infect people without their knowledge, although allegedly with the consent of Guatemalan health authorities. The sister of the president of Guatemala during the time when the experiments occurred, Juan José Arévalo, spoke out, saying that her brother had no idea what was happening.

Since the U.S. admitted to the experiments, which some Guatemalan newspapers are saying were done on up to 1,610 people, President Alvaro Colom created an investigatory commission to find out the who, what, when, where and why.

While details about what happened are scarce in the U.S. media. The Guatemalan media has been revealing chilling details of the depravity of the U.S. medical team and their lack of humanity towards Guatemalan men, women, and children.
Some files revealed show that some people experimented on were given cartons of cigarettes in exchange for being infected/injected.
Other files indicate that at one point after being denied access to more adult experimental subjects, children in orphanages were used specifically for blood tests.

The U.S. has officially apologized but one has to wonder. What if these papers had never been stumbled upon? What other experiments conducted upon Latin Americans, where the CIA had embedded themselves, do we not know about and what could possibly be happening now. Considering that the majority of Guatemalans are of indigenous background, the revelation of these experiments should remind us all of the legacy of Columbus and colonialism.

Via/ El Diario de Centro America, Prensa Libre y Siglo XXI, Boston.com