Report
The relative success of public health in Latin America ought to give us cause for hope when we consider the future of the AIDS pandemic in the region. A commitment to public health, sizable financial investments to treat AIDS in developing countries, and the political victory that many nations in the region have won by asserting their right to produce generic HIV drugs all give us grounds for a guarded optimism.
The success story that is told about the “Brazilian model” of responding to the HIV/AIDS epidemic is often oversimplified, and it is easy to find examples of ongoing problems, internal contradictions, and other factors that should remind us that whatever Brazil has accomplished is still fragile and could easily be undone. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the Brazilian response has been one of the world’s most successful, with important lessons for the field of global public health.
Colombia’s armed conflict is taking the AIDS epidemic among the country’s women and displaced population in radically new directions. Both guerrillas and paramilitaries often run prostitution rackets in areas under their control, forcing sex workers to have unprotected sex and extract bits of information from enemy clients. Combatants themselves are five times more likely than civilians to contract HIV.
Arachu Castro, Yasmin Khawja, and Ida González-Núñez
The universal provision of antiretroviral medications in Cuba has had an impact not only on the country’s already low infection rate, but on the social life of AIDS. This is clear from the experience of Cuban HIV-positive mothers, the majority of whom have given birth to HIV-negative children. For many of these women, the new treatment has allowed them to regain some control over their reproductive lives and contest, through pregnancy, years of disease and rejection.
Before the anti-corporate-globalization movement re-energized U.S. HIV/AIDS activism at the turn of the 21st century, a small band of Latinos launched an effort in solidarity with Latin Americans affected by HIV. ACT UP Americas pursued a variety of efforts to this end, like producing a Spanish-language newsletter distributed throughout the region and applying international pressure on the Argentine government to recognize a gay rights and AIDS organization.