Venezuela's Chavez: did U.S. give Latin American leaders cancer?

[Judi Lynn]

84. He most clearly remembers being kidnapped, held outside the country on an island

while a military coup was attempted, before the public finally found out through non-right-wing-controlled media, poured into the streets, surrounded Miraflores, and forced the return of their elected President.

The story is well known by now.

Over a thousand people in Guatemala continued to remember being controlled by U.S. doctors, and infected with sexual diseases, remembered that experience up to the time they died in agony. That story is well known, as well.

In fact, people right here in the United States recalled being injected and forced to experience living hell, too, up until they died, also, helplessly, suffering helplessly at the hands of U.S. government-employed doctors.

The United States government did something that was wrong—deeply, profoundly, morally wrong. It was an outrage to our commitment to integrity and equality for all our citizens. . . . clearly racist.

—President Clinton's apology for the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment to the eight remaining survivors, May 16, 1997

For forty years between 1932 and 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) conducted an experiment on 399 black men in the late stages of syphilis. These men, for the most part illiterate sharecroppers from one of the poorest counties in Alabama, were never told what disease they were suffering from or of its seriousness. Informed that they were being treated for “bad blood,”1 their doctors had no intention of curing them of syphilis at all. The data for the experiment was to be collected from autopsies of the men, and they were thus deliberately left to degenerate under the ravages of tertiary syphilis—which can include tumors, heart disease, paralysis, blindness, insanity, and death. “As I see it,” one of the doctors involved explained, “we have no further interest in these patients until they die.”

The Tuskeegee Experiment and the shocking crimes against Guatemalan people were completely unknown by the U.S. citizens, the ones who footed the bill for this criminality on the part of the U.S. government, completely hidden from the public for a very long time until the information was finally exposed, and revealed to the world.

People who are concerned about the morality of situations like this have been sadly awakened by the truth of the matter for a long time, as well.

It's hardly virgin territory for our own government.