Guatemalans are appalled over new revelations that from 1946 to 1948 U.S. medical researchers infected more than a thousand non-consenting Guatemalans with venereal diseases. The doctors who administered similar experiments on African-American sharecroppers in 1932 had told their research subjects simply that they were being treated for “bad blood.” And bad blood is what has been generated—or simply augmented—by this grim episode in the history of U.S.-Guatemala relations.

For the last two decades, the dominant narrative justifying the U.S. military’s activities in Latin America has been the war on drugs and the fight against “narco-terrorists.” In the last ten years, however, the U.S. military has undertaken several unrelated activities including low-profile tests of military equipment; humanitarian assistance that the military itself acknowledges has intelligence-gathering purposes; and training to suppress social protest. This article was originally published in the May/June 2011 issue of the NACLA Report on the Americas.

The following is an interview with Carlos Amaya, son of the renowned Honduran novelist, Ramón Amaya Amador, and a grassroots activist in the Honduran National Front of Popular Resistance (FNRP). He speaks on the past, present, and future of the Honduran resistance.

The North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) seeks a full-time Co-Editor to produce our bimonthly magazine on Latin American politics and U.S. relations with the region, NACLA Report on the Americas. The ideal candidate will have a strong background in magazine journalism as well as Latin American studies.