"I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class thug for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents" Major General Smedley Butler, US Marine Corps
I see the US has issued a public apology for the medical experiments it conducted on Guatemalans from 1946 to 1948. The victims, poor people, prisoners and the mentally ill, were intentionally infected with syphilis and gonorrhea The US officials involved were decent sorts when it came to the prisoners. Recognizing that these poor folks were incarcerated and unable to enjoy the finer pleasures of life, rather than shoot them up with viruses they hired prostitutes and sent them in to the prisons for conjugal visits.
The “research” the Wall Street Journal tells us, “Was conducted with cooperation from some government officials”. One might ask how come they were able to do this in a foreign country. Well, to US capitalism Guatemala was not so much a foreign country but its own back yard. The US through the CIA and the United Fruit Company has a history of interference and outright slaughter in Guatemala. This conscious experimental germ warfare that US capitalism imposed on workers and the poor (mostly indigenous) people in this small country is the least of it.
In 1954 a CIA sponsored coup overthrew the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz on behalf of the United Fruit Co. and other big landowners. Arbenz had introduced land reforms that threatened the domination of the United Fruit Company over Guatemalan society. Only 2% of landowners owned 72% of the arable land, much of it unused. United fruit alone held 600,000 acres of mostly unused land. The Guatemalan colonel that the CIA selected to replace Arbenz immediately outlawed hundreds of trade unions and returned more than 1.5 million acres to United fruit Co.
Instrumental in planning the coup were the Dulles brothers, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, Allen Dulles who was director of the CIA. These two also helped orchestrate the CIA coup that overthrew the secular democratic government of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 and replaced him with the murderous Shah. They were former partners of United Fruit’s main law firm in Washington. By 1985 some 75,000 people were dead or had disappeared at the hands of the Guatemalan dictatorship; a huge amount in this tiny country. Some 150,000 Indians fled to Mexico and beyond. Many of the brothers and sisters we see on the streets today as day laborers are from this area.
Are we to assume the Bush family, Kennedy’s Dulles’ and others knew nothing about this as intimately involved as they were in Central Ame4rican affairs? The murderers who did this are still alive.
“We deeply regret that it happened and we apologize to all individuals who were affected by such abhorrent research practices” say Hilary Clinton and Kathleen Sibelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services. That's very nice, but hardly comforting to the victims. I have limited knowledge of syphilis but from what I understand it is an excruciating debilitating disease that can result in madness.
The Guatemalans should reject this apology; it means nothing coming from these people. And by the way; when are the Vietnamese going to get their apology, the unprovoked attack on them by US capitalism killed an estimated four million people. And the dioxin the US sprayed on them (and its own troops) is still having an effect as their children are still being born deformed because of it?
Smedley Butler, author of the introductory quote above, criticized the profit motive behind wars. He was right about that conclusion even if he failed to grasp the solution to it all. Wars, and the actions of the US government with regard to these events in Guatemala are not acts of liberation, just wars for the emancipation of the masses. They are wars of conquest and exploitation in the struggle for surplus value, the source of profit.
We won't end these actions without eliminating the source of them-----capitalism. The collectivization of capital and the means of production through the introduction of a democratic socialist system is what will end this thuggery.
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