The experiments were in the news because then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had issued a public apology
to the government of Guatemala for violating its citizens’ human
rights. Álvaro Colom, president of Guatemala when Clinton made
reconciliation efforts, announced an investigation into the matter.
Then-President Barack Obama asked the Presidential Commission for the
Study of Bioethical Issues to commence a report investigating how these
horrifying experiments came to be. The report has been completed, the
apology long since issued. But for families like Frederico’s,
compensation and treatment has still not come.
Clinton’s apology was spurred by the experiments’ discovery—made by
Susan Reverby, a historian at Wellesley College, in 2003. Reverby had
been researching the Tuskegee experiments, perhaps the most famous
example of a breach of medical ethics in the United States. In those
experiments, black men who had already contracted syphilis had been told
they were being treated when they were actually receiving placebos as
part of an experiment on the effectiveness of treatment. All the while,
these men were being observed by doctors interested in learning how
their bodies would degrade from the illness. When the reality of the
experiment became clear, in the 1970s, it was immediately stopped and a
major lawsuit was filed. [...]
Six months after Cutler arrived in Guatemala, he began his intentional
exposure experiments within the Guatemalan army. He also thought he
would try a way to get around the trickiness of infecting the men:
prostitutes. In one early study, he infected prostitutes by moistening a
cotton swab with pus carrying gonorrhea bacteria and inserting it into
their genitals “with considerable vigor.” There is no evidence they were
informed about the risk. All of them contracted the disease.
He then had them have sex with the men he wanted to study, first
prisoners and then the army. (He had switched from prisoners to the army
after realizing that despite being plied with free sex workers and
alcohol, many prisoners believed they were growing weaker because of
blood draws.) Army men were often lubricated with alcohol, too, before
being set up with the prostitutes. The women were asked to have sex with
multiple men in a row. In one case, one prostitute had sex with eight
soldiers in a period of 71 minutes. The soldiers were never informed
that this was part of a medical experiment, obliterating any possibility
that consent was obtained and making the experiments ethically unsound.
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