ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — Residents of a historic Hispanic village in New Mexico are praising President Barack Obama's plan to visit Hiroshima — the Japanese city where the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb.
But residents also want Obama to visit their village of Tularosa next to where U.S. government tested the first atomic bomb. Residents say generations of descendants have suffered from various cancers and health problems resulting from the Trinity Test in a remote stretch of New Mexico desert.
The White House announced Tuesday that Obama this month will become the first sitting American president to visit Hiroshima. The bomb decimated the city and shot the world into the Atomic Age.
Tina Cordova, co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders, says the U.S. government has never acknowledged how the Trinity Test hurt Tularosa residents.