A Cautious Hope: HIV/AIDS in Latin America

As the HIV/AIDS pandemic enters its third decade in Latin America, not all the news is bad. Large public investments in the treatment and prevention of the disease offer some cautious hopethat the pandemic can be slowed, contained, and made more bearable for those who suffer its effects. Even more important, as Shawn Smallman suggests herein, “the political victory that Brazil and other developing nations won, by asserting their right to produce generic drugs against HIV,” has improved the life chances of the region’s AIDS patients.

July/August
2008
Volume: 
41
Number: 
1

Taking Note

Fred Rosen
According to the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, a growth of only 15% in food prices in 2008 is likely to drive some 15.7 million Latin Americans into a position of desperate food insecurity (“indigence”), and another 15 million into moderate insecurity (“poverty”).

Updates

Peter Lambert
Euphoria swept the streets of Asunción, Paraguay, after Fernando Lugo won the April presidential election, ending more than six decades of single-party rule. Lugo‚s reform efforts, however, are likely to face widespread, organized resistance.
Eric Stoner
Despite the fact that public sentiment in Latin America has been strongly against the Iraq war since it began, thousands of Latin Americans have the joined the occupation, many of them as private contractors hired by U.S. companies like Blackwater and Triple Canopy.

Report

Shawn Smallman
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.
Richard Parker
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.
Teo Ballvé
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.
M. Alfredo González
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.­

Reviews

Cynthia Young
Assata aka Joanne Chesimard (DVD, 2008), a film by Fred Baker, 93 minutes, www.filmsbyfredbaker.com
Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo
Ex Mex: From Migrants to Immigrants, by Jorge G. Castañeda, The New Press, 2007, 222 pp., $25.95 hardcover
NACLA
Reason to Believe: Cultural Agency in Latin American Evangelicalism by David Smilde; The People Behind Colombian Coal: Mining, Multinationals, and Human Rights, edited by Aviva Chomsky, Garry Leech, and Steve Striffler; and Environmental Justice in Latin America: Problems, Promise, and Practice, edited by David Carruthers.

MALA

Bret Gustafson
There are two salient trends in reporting on Bolivia in the U.S. press: (1) the personalization of Morales as the representative of Bolivia’s transformation backed by social movements and (2) the misrepresentation of both the new Bolivian Constitution and the so-called Autonomy Statutes of the business and regionalist elite.