In October 2010, the U.S. government apologized to Guatemala for experiments conducted in the country during the 1940s. U.S. and Guatemalan doctors working with the Pan American Sanitary Bureau (PASB) intentionally infected at least 1,308 Guatemalan soldiers, prisoners, hospital patients, and registered sex workers with three sexually-transmitted infections (STIs)—syphilis, gonorrhea, and chancroid. They wanted to study whether various chemical prophylaxis solutions they had prepared prevented the spread of STIs. The researchers paid sex workers to transmit the diseases. When “normal exposure” did not work, they tried using syringes to infect people with STIs. The doctors then conducted blood draws and invasive medical inspections of Guatemalan schoolchildren, orphans, and hospital patients to determine the prevalence of STIs in the country and the accuracy of diagnostic tests. They did not receive informed consent, nor did they provide the majority of the Guatemalans they infected with available treatments, including penicillin—which the same U.S. doctors had discovered to be an effective cure for syphilis just a few years earlier.
U.S. and Guatemalan doctors then tried to hide the experiments from the general public, even as they gossiped about them among themselves. The doctors faced an active group of moral reformers and anti-vivisectionists in the United States who carefully monitored human subject research. In 1947, exactly when the U.S. researchers were in Guatemala, the New York Times published a “note on science” saying that experiments in which researchers infected people with STIs in order to study the disease would be “ethically impossible.” In Latin America, U.S. experimentation on humans was similarly controversial. In the 1930s, for example, Puerto Rican nationalists got hold of a letter written by Cornelius P. Rhoads, a Rockefeller Foundation doctor in Puerto Rico, in which he claimed that he deliberately gave cancer to Puerto Ricans. Rhoads later insisted he was joking, but the nationalists publicized the letter, leading to fierce denunciations of U.S. imperialism in Puerto Rico and throughout Latin America.