NPR/PRI had this Guatemala law suit on its top-of-the-hour reporting here in NH

posted this. While it's always nice to see new people on here, and as MJT points out not entirely an accurate representation of your headline and copy. That notwithstanding:

1. This is really old news. I would venture to say that the majority of people on here who have an interest in Nicaragua and more broadly CA have seen this over the past year or so that it has recieved press coverage. 2. Very (as in most marginally) related to Nicaragua...which is what this site is about. 3. Yes, there are times when post reference the USA and sometimes they are germane (many times not), but I don't think this is the forum for posts that are here simply to indict (or attempt to) the USA, or any other country.ZZT

The Infowars article leave out quite a few details, many facts, and tells an outright falsity (“Researchers in that [Tuskegee] case tricked the men into accepting free medical care, and purposely infected them with the disease…”); doubtless, the author never read the case documents or the definitive article on the Guatemala study - let alone anything per Tuskegee, not even Wikipedia. As a moral judgment it is easy; as a legal case it is complicated.

The Guatemala experiments were via the same researcher as Tuskegee, John Cutler. It is surprising that the Guatemalan government didn’t know of the experiment until the U.S. government notified them (when President Barack Obama called Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom to apologize for the experiments), given that records show the Guatemalan government consented to the experiments. Strangely, Cutler’s obituary (died 2003; he appears in the PBS Documentary, “Deadly Deception”) mentions the Guatemala work, but apparently no one ever researched that study. The papers were sitting in the University of Pittsburgh Library Archives where Medical Historian Susan Reverby found them.

It is common to see on the www people demanding indictments via the Nuremberg Code and reading the lack of a settlement offer as a U.S. strategic legal tactic (it might be; it might not be). But, this study coincides with the Nuremberg Code (this study was 1946-1948, and the Nuremberg code didn’t debut until late 1947 and wasn’t then codified) - though letters show Cutler and others knew they should have focused on military men and prisoners who could consent. Neither the U.S. nor the Guatemalan government were in a position to fully confirm or evaluate the evidence on such short notice, and the settlement process presupposes that the lawsuit has been filed (not filing, then complaining that no settlement is forthcoming, is itself a legal tactic).

The difference -which is critical- between Tuskegee and Guatemala is that in Guatemala doctors actively assisted in the infection of syphilis and, then, the doctors actively treated them with penicillin. It is unclear the study was conducted in Guatemala to hide it; the Pan American Sanitary Bureau (later the Pan American Health Organization) was already operating there for nearly 50 years. One of the leading venereal disease experts was Guatemalan Juan Funes. Also, there was an ill-conceived racial theory then that Mesoamerican Latinos and Indians differed in contraction and cure rates – so the study apparently required people from that part of the world. The eventual study involved not just a division of the U.S. government but on the Guatemalan end: the National Ministry of Health, the National Army of the Revolution, the National Mental Health Hospital and the National Ministry of Justice.

The problems for the researchers were that: (1) too many people in their assigned control group already had syphilis and the study required people who were newly infected; (2) of the people newly infected, too few were able to give syphilis to sexual partners regardless of sexual activity. The reluctance of many prisoners to be blood-tested often eventually ended that part of the trial, so on some weird, weak level consent seemed to matter. The study moved to orphans, where the study focused on congenital syphilitic children (infected at birth, not infected by doctors) and how they responded to penicillin. The studies with children didn’t answer the core transmission questions, so they moved to patients in the asylum.

The setup is said to involve bribes, which on some level is true, but institutional payment was in the form of medicine, medical equipment, food preparation equipment, and sanitation – all that was intended for inmate care or education. When asked about Cutler, the historian who –has spent years outlining Tuskegee- unearthed the Guatemalan documents responded, “… I think that’s why it’s important not to see him as a monster, but to understand the institutional context in which the war—he saw it as a war on syphilis, so he saw these people as soldiers, and people die in a war. And I think that’s the key to understand him. And so the real issue for us—our job as historians is to provide the context, not just the facts, but how to understand them. That’s what we have to do here…”. Sadly, it is hard to find any journalistic account that dealt with facts or perspective.