The US has issued an apology to Guatemala after the discovery by an American historian, Susan Reverby, that John Cutler, one of the doctors involved in the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study in the 1960s, conducted similar experiments on unconsenting Guatemalan subjects twenty years earlier. The Guatemalan experiments, in which the local authorities appear to have been complicit, were carried out on prisoners and mental patients. In some cases prostitutes with syphilis were brought in to infect the men; others had the bacteria poured over abrasions on their penises or injected into their spines. It happened between 1946 and 1948, during the Ten Years of Spring (1944-54), a period with a cherished place in the national imagination.