Guatemalan Collaboration in the Guatemala Syphilis Experiments, 1946–48, and Its Implications for Justice

In 2005, historian Susan Reverby was shocked by her discovery of the Guatemalan Syphilis Experiments in the papers of United States Public Health Service (USPHS) scientist John Cutler, which had been donated to the University of Pittsburgh after his death. The reports detailed Cutler’s collaborative Guatemalan Syphilis Experiments (1946-1948), under the direction of John F. Mahoney, with funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health. The experiment deliberately infected about 1,308 healthy people with syphilis and gonorrhea, without their informed consent. The infected consisted of the most marginalized populations in Guatemala, including sex workers, prisoners, soldiers, mental hospital patients, and orphans aged 10 to 72. Reverby’s 2010 publication about the experiments prompted an official apology from President Barack Obama for a “gross violations of ethics.” Victims of the experiments, and the families that survived them, have so far received no further justice.

Historians have further elaborated the United States’ role in funding and organizing the experiments, citing the ethical and legal constraints in the United States as reasons for why Cutler would choose Guatemala for his experiment. However, historians have yet to investigate why there was a precedent by the 1940s for using Guatemala and specifically Indigenous Guatemalans for sexually transmitted infection research. This paper does so, examining the role Guatemalan officials and institutions had in supporting Cutler and providing research subjects for the experiments. By tracing the connections between Guatemalan officials and Cutler, it demonstrates the transnational relationships required to conduct violent medical experimentation in Latin America, and how they add nuance to models of U.S. imperialism in medicine and science. Subsequently, this paper will also ponder how illuminating such connections could affect future civil and criminal cases in Guatemala and other manners of restorative justice for victims’ families.