Bernice Gutierrez told me her life story last summer aboard a bus speeding through the southern New Mexican desert. She told me about her mother's diagnosis with three types of cancer, her brothers' battles with cancer, her sister's recurring bouts of thyroid cancer and cancers of two of her children, one of whom died. She told me about how she had her thyroid surgically removed, on doctor's advice, because she would almost certainly develop cancer. Then she told me how no one seems to care. Gutierrez was born in the shadow of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the first atomic bomb. She was 8 days old when a huge explosion lit up the predawn sky in July 1945 at the Trinity site, about 35 miles west of her hometown, Carrizozo, N.M. She said her story in that desert community, population 970, wasn't unique. Many New Mexicans were sickened because of the blast's radioactive fallout, which fell from the sky like snow for days. There was no warning. When locals asked about the explosion, the U.S. military told them an accident at an ammunition dump was to blame. As New Mexico's rolling hills and cactus-dotted desert zoomed past, I listened. Gutierrez, a soft-spoken grandmother, is spending her golden years demanding justice from Washington for what the U.S. government did to her family, friends and fellow Americans. And she's not alone. Since 1990, the U.S. government has provided medical care, health screenings and $50,000 compensation payments to American downwinders, or people exposed to radiation from the nation's main nuclear test site during the Cold War, in Nevada. But New Mexicans were never eligible for federal assistance under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, known as RECA. It's as if they were forgotten. RECA is due to expire on June 7, bringing an end to the program. A bill currently stalled in Congress would extend the law and expand compensation to include New Mexico and other overlooked communities whose documented health struggles are linked to the nuclear program. The Senate passed the bill in a rare bipartisan vote in March, but Speaker Mike Johnson has thus far refused to allow a House vote. I recently spoke to Gutierrez again about all this. She told me she "hopes and prays," Johnson will do the right thing. She's spent the past several months trying to organize and urge Americans to call their representatives in Congress on the RECA expansion. "People still don't understand that we exist here," she told me. The House can prove her wrong with one simple vote. Here's what we're focusing on today:
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Wednesday, May 22, 2024
Opinion Today: What we owe the victims of nuclear testing
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