United Press International - December 1, 2004
Eliza Barclay, UPI Correspondent

According to the National Council for the Prevention and Control of AIDS, known as CONASIDA, the campaigns to educate and prevent AIDS in Mexico have focused on women and children, while the real problem lies with men.

Though the Mexican Ministry of Health took World AIDS Day as an opportunity to call attention to the low-profile but smoldering pandemic of AIDS in the country, local organizations say Mexico's deep-rooted culture of machismo has inhibited authorities from honestly addressing the problem.

"It's as if you had a house on fire and you were throwing water away from the calls for help," said Arturo Betancourt, spokesman for CONASIDA. "That is what has been occurring with the campaigns."

In concert with the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS's dedication of World AIDS Day to women and girls, the Mexican Ministry of Health said it would be collaborating with non-governmental organizations to prevent the spread of AIDS among sex workers. Though the majority of the 21 civil organizations that work with sex workers in Mexico are devoted to female sex workers, the ministry did make a point in its statement to commit to reaching out to both male and female sex workers.

"We will distribute condoms through the established mechanisms to promote and increase their use among the male and female sex workers who are members of the (21) organizations," said Jorge Saavedra Lopez, director- general of the National Center for the Prevention and Control of HIV- AIDS, known as CENSIDA.

Additionally, as the slogan for the World AIDS Day press conference on Tuesday, CENSIDA and the 21 organizations offered, "Machismo puts the risk on women and men. You can change it!"

While AIDS is not devastating Mexico's population the way it is in regions like sub-Saharan Africa and some Caribbean nations, it is becoming a greater concern to Mexican health officials. According to CENSIDA, Mexico has 90,043 diagnosed carriers of the HIV virus, while 160,000 people are estimated to be carrying the HIV virus unbeknownst to themselves.

According to CENSIDA, 80 percent out of the 897 new cases of HIV diagnosed in the first half of 2004, were men, while only 18.3 percent were women and 2 percent were children under 15.

In its 2004 AIDS Epidemic Update released last week, the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS concurred that in Mexico, "In the past few years, much higher rates of HIV have been found among injecting drug users (up to 6 percent) and men who have sex with men (up to 15 percent)." International AIDS groups have also noted that another key at- risk group is male migrants who travel to live and work in the United States and pay for sex there.

As a fiercely Catholic country with a ruling philosophy that homosexuality is a sin, Mexico has been slow to acknowledge or address the growing community of homosexuals, considered a high-risk social group for the AIDS epidemic by the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS. In 2003, first lady Marta Sahagun championed the use of condoms as protection against AIDS, but two Catholic bishops sharply denounced her and told Reforma, a daily newspaper, it was "depraved" to sanction sexual liberty by advocating condom use.

Furthermore, AIDS workers say that Mexico's tradition of machismo has fostered a culture of men following their sexual impulses with little thought of risks or after-effects.

"The Mexican man says, 'If I want to have sex, I will have sex,' and for this reason, he is more likely to be careless and put himself and others at risk," Dr. Victor Hernandez, medical director for Ser Humano -- a non- profit organization in that works on AIDS prevention and directly with patients -- told United Press International.

But beyond the discomfort that Mexico feels with the topic of homosexuality and the rise of the deadly virus, what is even further from public acknowledgment is the possibility that a significant portion of the population could be bisexual.

"Mexico does not have good numbers of the phenomenon of bisexuality, but I have seen that a large number of men who contract the disease sleep with both men and women," Hernandez said. "The government's preventative programs are very poor, but they must be improved because AIDS is now beginning to rise among the women, who sleep with the bisexual men, and their children."
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