Guatemala was in the news for something other than natural disasters for the first time in a while when last week President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hilary Clinton apologized to Guatemalan President Colom and the Guatemalan people after information about a controversial 1940s study in which U.s. doctors – funded by U.S. government money – deliberately infected Guatemalan sex workers, prisoners, mental patients, and soldiers with syphilis to test whether penicillin – then newly created – would work against syphilis. The study – carried on by the same doctor who studied African American men with syphilis which he let go untreated – also smacked of studies carried on around the same time by Nazis and the Japanese partly on U.S. prisoners of war. In spite of the horrid details and President Colom and President Obama (pictured above at a meeting last year) going back and forth a little on it, the episode in a way served to underline the close relationship between the two countries.
- Perry
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