Wellesley professor unearths a horror: Syphilis experiments in Guatemala
I don't have a lot of time to write this up very formally, but I thought this was a noteworthy article that was forwarded to everybody in SPH by another student.
My question is what is a government to do 70 years after the fact? Obama has apologized for this to the Guatemalan government, but if I remember correctly (I read this a few days ago), there was also a question of possible reparations of some sort. Personally, I don't really see what good it would do. The impression I got was that there were unlikely to be any descendants of these people. In that case, the suffering inflicted can not be undone or assuaged. The horror some may experience now is unlikely to be any higher than you or I might experience reading about this. And with a Guatemalan government complicit in the act at the time, how are the United States any more guilty than they?
What are your thoughts?
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