-Demonstration against the privatization of public health services organised in part by members of the anti-capitalist social medicine group in Santiago, Chile, 1996, in response to the stripping of healthcare services initiated by US-backed dictator Augusto Pinochet. This intervention was designed by the CIA to weaken the state apparatus of Chile to loosen regulation on the massive US-based corporation the United Fruit Company, which Chilean politicians were trying to banish from the country. John Foster Dulles' sibling, Allen Dulles, who led the CIA during Eisenhower's presidency, was also engaged in legal services for United Fruit. The Dulles brothers, along with the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, were on the payroll of United Fruit for a duration of thirty-eight years.
We are a community organization dedicated to the empirical sociological study of the rich international history of radicalism in health activism, and the application of those strategies to modern day public health problems in Alabama. Social medicine as academically understood today is an approach to public health developed initially by South American- particularly Chilean- clinicians and public health workers as a response to understand how their health was affected by increasing fascism and authoritarianism in their homeland. This approach to public health was taken by activist groups all over the world in their fights for justice, from the Black Panthers of the USA, to the Dalit Panthers of India. (Dalits are considered the lowest caste in Indian society, and are subject to frequent abuse similar to oppressed groups of other countries that have class stratification).
“A person’s health is their most valuable possession. Improper health care and inadequate facilities can be used to perpetuate genocide on a people. The present fascist, racist government used its facilities for that purpose- the genocide of poor and oppressed people. The people must create institutions within our communities that are controlled and run by the people in order to endure our survival.”
— Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, 1972; the “Sickle Cell Anemia Testing” sign is visible in the top right of the photograph.
“WE WANT COMPLETELY FREE HEALTH CARE FOR ALL BLACK AND OPPRESSED PEOPLE. We believe that the government must provide, free of charge, for the people, health facilities which will not only treat our illnesses, most of which have come about as a result of our oppression, but which will also develop preventive medical programs to guarantee our future survival. We believe that mass health education and research programs must be developed to give all Black and oppressed people access to advanced scientific and medical information, so we may provide ourselves with proper medical attention and care.”
— The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, 1972, Point Six of their infamous Ten-Point Program, in response to the news of the horrors of the Tuskegee, Alabama Syphilis Study
“All Dalits must be given free education, medical facilities, housing and good quality cheap grains.”
— The Dalit Panther Party for Self-Defense, 1972, in the Dalit Panther Party Manifesto, similar to the Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program, in response to government, hospital and physician abuse of Dalits
