Forum on Power, Justice and Public Memory in Central America at GVSU: Archival research on Human Experiments in Guatemala, 1946 – 1948

The second presenter at today’s Latin American Studies forum was Anna Carla Ericastilla, the current Director of the Archivo General de Centroamérica. Anna presented in Spanish, but a translator was provided.

The presenter began with a brief summary about the circumstances centering around the medical experiments conducted by US doctors on Guatemalans without their knowledge or consent.

The three archival centers in Guatemala had no knowledge of this atrocious history, but upon the discovery they began their own investigation. The objective of this investigation was to provide information to the Guatemalan government to take action on behalf of the dignity of their people.

The investigation involved the review of documents from nine different agencies and took 6 months to complete. Part of the framework for the investigation involved determining who were the people whom these experiments were conducted on – prisoners, prostitutes, the mentally ill and soldiers. There were several teams involved in the investigation, some which collected the documents and others that did the quantitative analysis of the information collected. Over 20,000 separate documents were part of this investigation.

In addition to collective the information the research team had to reconstruct the social makeup of Guatemala at the time and what mechanisms allowed for these experiments to take place. This included the role of the Ministry of Health, the military, police and legal system involved that would contribute to the medical experiments taking place. Anna also mentioned that this period was the tail end of a 4 decade dictatorship, where the state was beginning determine new social dynamics.

The researchers found that roughly 2,000 people were subjected to the medical experiments. However, since most of them were infected with STDs they most like infected members of their families or other people they came in contact with.

The group also sought to investigate who all was involved in these experiments, both from the US and within Guatemala that participated in or allowed them to happen. In addition, there was the need to determine everything from who performed the experiments, costs of resources used and other indicators to verify the claims made. One such resource discovered were the use of rabbits to incubate the STDs, which allowed the medical personnel a regular source to infect the people.

One other aspect the researchers found out women who worked as prostitutes were also used as a weapon to infect men. In some cases, the women in prostitution was forced to have sex with a dozen men in an hour in order to infect them. The men used for these experiments were those diagnosed as mentally ill, prisoners and soldiers.

They researchers also discovered that the US doctors admitted that they needed to do these kinds of experiments in Guatemala because they would not be able to conduct them in the United States.

An additional question the researchers wanted to answer was whether or not the Guatemalans used in these experiments were victims of torture. The researchers, according to the presenter, had to divorce themselves from their own personal feelings about this history and make determinations based on the research. However, the research term did conclude that these experiments did constitute a form of torture.

In conclusion, according to the presenter, the final document will include 8 chapters that will cover the social and political context of the experiments, the administrative structure in which the experiments were planned and conducted, reports on the identities of those involved, those responsible for the experiments and the subjects of those experiments.

Anna concluded her comments by stating that this was yet one more chapter of the long legacy of unjust relations between the US and Guatemala that have plague Guatemala for over a century.