Guatemalans sue US for deliberately spreading illness in 1940s experiment
A lawsuit was filed Monday in a US district court on behalf of 700 Guatemalan soldiers, mental health patients, and orphans secretly experimented on from 1946 to 1948.
An apology is not enough for Guatemalans deliberately infected with syphilis by a US medical team in the 1940s. Five months after the American taxpayer-funded medical experiment came to light, victims have brought a class-action lawsuit against the US government seeking compensation for resulting health problems. Seven named plaintiffs, which include both victims and heirs living in Guatemala, filed the lawsuit Monday in a Washington, D.C., district court on behalf of 700 Guatemalan soldiers, mental health patients, and orphans. The victims were all secretly experimented on from 1946 to 1948, the complaint says. The experiments were “both unprecedented and unequivocally impermissible in the United States and throughout the civilized world,” the complaint states. The court brief charges that US public health doctors hired prostitutes diagnosed with syphilis or gonorrhea to have sexual relations with soldiers, prison inmates, and psychiatric patients in Guatemala with the intention of spreading the disease. Once the unknowing subjects were diagnosed with illnesses, the US medical team tested them for potential cures, including penicillin. Orphaned Guatemalan children as young as 6 years old were used as an uninfected test group, according to the suit.
Robert Parry: Guatemala: A Test Tube of Repression