By Lucia Muñoz
M.I.A. | Executive Director and Founder
To call these experiments “a dark chapter in U.S. history” is to pretend that it is over. Today, as the U.S. government mulls indefinitely over granting TPS to Guatemalan citizens while their homeland is besieged by natural disasters, as it continues exploitative economic policies that mine the labor of Guatemalan workers, it reminds us that even today the Guatemalan body and voice are expendable.
Last Thursday, U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton revealed that 700 Guatemalan citizens, soldiers, prisoners, sex workers, and mentally disabled patients were infected with syphilis and gonnorhea by the United States government between 1946 and 1948.
While MIA understands that neither the current administration, nor the American people are directly responsible for what President Colom has called ‘crimes against humanity’, we feel strongly that this “experimentation” is symptomatic of the arrogance and disregard for the autonomy of others that has characterized not only terrible scientific judgments, but also the U.S.’s diplomatic relations with the nations of Latin America and the Global South.
The metaphor of the octopus, headed by the United Fruit Company with tentacles of power and influence entangling nearly every aspect of the governance and economy of Guatemala, has long been a popular image to describe the nefarious reaches of the United States in this nation. This latest, shocking revelation reminds us that these tentacles were not abstract or white collar machinations, the tentacles invaded the most intimate regions of body and soul. They scratched the cheeks and arms of Guatemalans, broke their skin and forced disease into their veins. These were acts that knowingly abused power and privilege, that victimized the marginalized, that invaded bodies and destroyed lives less precious than those of Americans.
The asymmetry of power and knowledge between the scientists, guardians of wisdom, and representatives of authority, and the “test subjects” selected because their agencies were compromised in the face of such authority by their citizenship and their positions in society, is not confined to experiments, nor to the past.
To call these experiments “a dark chapter in U.S. history” is to pretend that it is over. Today, as the U.S. government mulls indefinitely over granting TPS to Guatemalan citizens while their homeland is besieged by natural disasters, as it continues exploitative economic policies that mine the labor of Guatemalan workers, it reminds us that even today the Guatemalan body and voice are expendable.
The Guatemalan Peace and Development Network has called on the United States to immediately comply with three proposals, to establish a fund of compensations (reparations) to the families of those who were affected by these trials; to immediately grant TPS for Guatemalans in the United States as a show of good will; and to put in place an economic plan comparable to the Marshall Plan, which would allow the countries ravaged by decades of civil wars instigated and funded by successive U.S. administrations to finally and definitively recover from years of economic turmoil.
MIA does not seek to hold individual Americans responsible for decades of exploitation. But it is time the United States take responsibility not only for the individuals harmed by these trials, but by the families, communities, and indeed, nations who live under the shadow of arrogant, self-interested U.S. decisions. It is time for the United States to accept that Guatemalans, regardless of their station in life, are endowed with the same rights and merit the same dignity as any U.S. citizen.
We call on the U.S. government to back up its words of contrition with concrete actions, and to stand with Guatemalans, to show us that a Guatemalan body and a Guatemalan voice are just as precious as any other, to help us turn the dying tentacles which sucked us dry into roots that nurture our growth.