Thank you Rich, always a pleasure to hear your insights!
I have to say that I was not expecting to find this story about Guatemala in the archives, it's a shocking chapter that no one really knows about. I just entered "Tuskegee" into the search and there it was.
Personally, I hadn't realized the extent of the war against VD but if you do a search about the PR campaign launched during WWII some interesting results come up. It was a significant problem and a huge campaign launched by the USG to try to combat it.
Tuskegee and Guatemala are both pretty horrific episodes and your comments about the reasons why African Americans were selected definitely are part of the story, but it's hard to determine the exact motivations. Another angle is that minorities and more vulnerable groups are targeted because few will care or pay attention. The Guatemalan government concludes that racism was a factor in the STD experiments, pointing to the high number of indigenous people selected from the prisons.
If you can stomach more, I'm going to delve into that in the second part of this deep dive.
Thanks for taking the time to check out my post!
Hope you're doing well.
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Funny, old friend, I stumbled across the Qaddafi story in much the same way. I had no idea what to write about and suddenly Qaddafi kept popping up. I did a paper in college, my first publication, on NAFTA and discovered that racism pervades Latin America -- the more European blood you have the higher you're allowed to rise in society. In fact it was Porfirio Diaz, a Mexican president who coined the term "The only good Indian is a dead Indian." I look forward to the next part.