Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles
guatemala
U.S. Gov. Secretly Infected Thousands of Guatemalans with STDs
05 months ago
United States government scientists infected 5,500 Guatemalans with syphilis and gonorrhea between 1946 and 1948 to study the effects of penicillin, according to recent findings of a U.S. presidential panel investigation set up by President Obama.
The Guatemalans forced to participate received no such explanation and did not give informed consent. In fact, of the estimated 5,500 participants, only about 700 received some sort of treatment.
“The researchers put their own medical advancement first and human decency a far second,” Anita Allen, a member of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues told the Associated Press.
From 1946 to 1948, the U.S. Public Health Service and the Pan American Sanitary Bureau worked with the Guatemalan government to conduct medical research paid for by the US government that involved deliberately exposing people to sexually transmitted diseases.
The Commission said some 5,500 Guatemalans were involved in the research with at least 1,300 Guatemalans deliberately infected with syphilis, gonorrhea or chancroid, another sexually transmitted disease. The patients who were forced to participate included soldiers, sex workers, prisoners and mental health patients.
The researchers were able to conduct any experiments they wanted to with the Guatemalans wit virtually no oversight. The AP reports on two of what they called the “most disturbing” experiments:
Seven women with epilepsy, who were housed at Guatemala’s Asilo de Alienados (Home for the Insane), were injected with syphilis below the back of the skull, a risky procedure. The researchers thought the new infection might somehow help cure epilepsy. The women each got bacterial meningitis, probably as a result of the unsterilized injections, but were treated.
Perhaps the most disturbing details involved a female syphilis patient with an undisclosed terminal illness. The researchers, curious to see the impact of an additional infection, infected her with gonorrhea in her eyes and elsewhere. Six months later she died.
Experts today say the research produced no useful medical information. The study was hidden for decades until last year when a Wellesley College medical historian discovered records among the papers of Dr. John Cutler, who led the experiments.
President Obama has called Guatemala’s president, Alvaro Colom, to apologize. The study currently being conducted to review the Guatemalan experiments was commissioned by the president.
The commission is due to publish its first report next month outlining the historical facts.
American Science’s Racist History Still Haunts the World
01 year ago
Early in America’s crusade to spread the wonders of modern medicine, a group of researchers in Guatemala did something unspeakable in the name of science. Documentation of the project is just now coming to light, more than 60 years later, and it reads like a horror novel: Hundreds of men systematically infected with syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases in an effort, endorsed by both the U.S. and Guatemalan governments, to research the effectiveness of drug treatment.
Researchers exposed men to disease with varying degrees of intent. At first, Guatemalan health official Juan Funes selected prisoners in Guatemala City as subjects because prostitution at the penitentiary would likely yield fresh infections. But the researchers used more invasive tactics as well. The Washington Post reports, “in other cases, doctors put infectious material on the cervixes of uninfected prostitutes before they had sex with prisoners.” When they needed more infections, they took more aggressive measures–”direct inoculations made from syphilis bacteria poured into the men’s penises and on forearms and faces that were slightly abraded . . . or in a few cases through spinal punctures,” according to the research of the historian who broke the story, Susan M. Reverby (interviewed recently on Democracy Now!).
Many, but not all, of these people–who included prisoners, soldiers and mental patients–were given penicillin to test its effectiveness as an after-sex treatment of syphilis, a disease that that can result in blindness or death. Medical personnel carried out similar studies on gonorrhea, which can lead to intense pain and infertility, and chancroid, which causes genital ulcers.
The archival documents suggest the experiments didn’t raise significant ethical qualms in Washington. The surgeon general at the time was quoted as saying, “You know, we couldn’t do such an experiment in this country.”
Well, in a way, they could. A bizarre element in the story is the connection to another shameful chapter in the history of American medicine. The man behind the infection of incarcerated Guatemalans, Dr. John Cutler, had a hand in the infamous Tuskegee experiments as well.
That study (also conducted in the name of public health, of course) involved recruiting syphilitic black men into a 40-year program that denied them treatment without their knowledge. The U.S. Public Health Service worked in partnership with the Tuskegee Institute to rope hundreds of men into serving as an unwitting control group. Many were never told about their condition and received either insufficient treatment or none at all. Although the Public Health Service was administering penicillin for syphilis by 1943, the Tuskegee “subjects” received none to continue the controlled study. Modern day informed consent guidelines stem from the bioethical scandal that laid bare the cruel entanglement of racism and science.
The Guatemalan research is further proof that medical abuses against people of color wasn’t limited to Tuskegee. In Puerto Rico, for example, starting in the 1950s poor women served as “guinea pigs” for trials of high-dosage birth control pills, which were later embroiled in an ethical scandal over their potentially dangerous side effects. Exploiting Puerto Rican women’s wombs was seen as a convenient alternative to dealing with all the political and ethical hurdles that would have surrounded studies of the pill on the mainland.
Experimentation on marginalized groups, at home and abroad, is something of a tradition in American medicine. A Counterpunch article documents over a century of cases of the government deliberately sickening unwitting subjects, stretching from military detainees in the Philippines exposed to the plague to incarcerated men in Chicago infected with malaria.
Many of the researchers involved with these experiments may have genuinely believed they were serving a higher purpose. They might have thought the ends justified the means, that the lives of these Guatemalan inmates or poor black men were somehow being redeemed through their participation in the trials, albeit unwittingly. But both Tuskegee and Guatemala City reflect a deep, even subconscious belief among medical practitioners in the inferiority of the other.
The subjects, meanwhile, are tied together by their utter powerlessness under the coercion of medical authorities–poor, often imprisoned by the state, and lacking the knowledge they need to control their own bodies fully. One of the cruelest outcomes of these experiments is that they’ve irrevocably damaged public trust in medical science, which has undermined the exploited communities’ health on an even broader level. Some advocates attribute the black AIDS crisis in part to a broad alienation of the community from the health care system.
“We are concerned about the way in which this horrendous experiment, even though it was 60 years ago, may appear to people hearing about it today as indicative of research studies that are not conducted in an ethical fashion,” National Institutes of Health Director Francis S. Collins told the Post after the Guatemala story broke.
Collins is referring to yet another high-stakes consequence: Globally, the impacts of today’s most damaging diseases fall heaviest in poor communities of color, and any new treatment rightly demands clinical trials in those contexts. Scientists continue to struggle to earn enough trust to fill those trials, and the Guatemala history is one big reminder of why that’s so. For clinical trials currently operating in the Global South, the scandals of past experiments will hopefully serve as a lesson in ethics for the future.
Man L.A. Cops Shot in Head Was Unarmed, Witness Says
01 year ago
Contrary to official Los Angeles Police Department reports, Manuel Jamines did not have a knife in his hand when police shot him in the head in Los Angeles on Sunday afternoon, an eyewitness claims. LA Weekly reports that an eyewitness is set to give a press conference today to announce what she saw.
Jamines, a Guatemalan immigrant, was killed on the corner of 6th Street and Union in Los Angeles by Officer Frank Hernandez. Police said they responded to a call that a man had tried to stab a pregnant woman on the street. They said that the 37-year-old father of three was drunk and holding a knife. According to the LAPD, Hernandez shot at Jamines when he would not obey the cop’s orders, which were given in both English and Spanish, and raised the knife over his head and lunged at Hernandez with a three-inch blade. Jamines’ family says that he spoke neither English nor Spanish well; he spoke K’iche’, a language spoken by a million indigenous Mayans from Central America.
The killing has sparked community outrage and several nights of protest. At a community meeting on Wednesday night with the LAPD and the Guatemalan Consul General, hundreds packed a Los Angeles middle school and booed LAPD Chief Charlie Beck as he defended his officers’ actions. Tuesday night’s protests ended with clashes between police and protesters. Hundreds gathered at the corner where Jamines was killed to voice their outrage, and then started marching to the LAPD Rampart station. The Los Angeles Times reports that protesters started trash can fires, broke bottles and threw eggs at police officers, who arrested four people.
The Associated Press reports that LAPD Officer Frank Hernandez was involved in two previous on-duty shootings.
Asylum System May Open Door for Femicide Survivors
01 year ago
“Femicide” isn’t a word you hear too often. The public silence surrounding that term is due to the same reason why it happens in the first place: women around the world who are systematically brutalized and killed are rendered invisible on two levels–first by their murderers, and then by a society that looks the other way. But a narrow window to humanitarian relief could be opening in the for survivors of femicide in the U.S. asylum system.
Ms. Magazine reports that a recent court ruling involving a Guatemalan immigrant could set a precedent for aiding those who are escaping, or want to avoid deportation to, communities where it is dangerous to be a woman.
The case of Lesly Yajayra Perdomo represents the silent plight of thousands of women in impoverished and conflict-ridden regions, where gender-based violence takes place regularly and with impunity. (Beware cultural determinism: it happens right here at home, too.)
After migrating to the U.S. as a teen, Perdomo faced deportation in 2003 and argued that her life would be endangered if she were sent back to Guatemala, where a wave of several thousand murders of women over the past decade have gone largely unpunished (though the government has taken measures to address this, on paper). The judge agreed that she had a valid asylum claim, and she will now argue her case afresh in court.
Carrie Baker explains:
The Immigration
and Nationality Act allows asylum for people persecuted because of
religion, political belief, race, nationality or particular social
group. Gender is not an explicit basis for asylum under U.S. law.
However, advocates have argued that women who are subject to
gender-based violence should be eligible for asylum as a “particular
social group.” Courts have granted asylum to women fleeing domestic
violence, female genital cutting, honor killing, forced marriage and widow abuse. At the end of last year, an immigration
judge granted asylum to Rody
Alvarado, a Guatemalan woman who had a history of extreme abuse by
her husband and who feared he would kill her if she returned to
Guatemala. The Perdomo decision follows and expands this line of
reasoning.
So U.S. asylum law, although gender itself does not automatically confer victim status, forms of persecution that are tied to the social position of women might.
Right wingers claim the asylum system is easy for women to game, but empirical evidence reveals that, in fact, the court system that is often rigged against immigrants, resulting in arbitrary and endless legal limbo.
The ruling could dovetail with other gender-conscious legal remedies for undocumented immigrant women under the Violence Against Women Act and the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. But again, we see piecemeal reforms building a lattice of protections for certain groups, though nothing could substitute for a broad human-rights based framework across the entire immigration system.
In the absence of a comprehensive overhaul that would establish a more uniform standard of justice, decisions like Perdomo are the best hope women have for enfranchisement in a world that treats them, on many levels, as second-class citizens.
Image: flickr via change.org