Several times each hour on prime-
time television, the Brazilian govem-
ment’s latest and flashiest AIDS adver-
tisement punctuates the commercials
between telenovelas, rock videos and
news programs. “Use condoms with
unknown partners, from beginning to
end,” counsels singer Caetano Veloso
in a quick, tight close-up. “There’s no
medicine for AIDS, but it can be com-
batted through prevention,” adds a well-
known soap opera star. And in its final
seconds, the government delivers the
real message to those who hope the
Sarney administration might do some-
thing about AIDS besides run commer-
cials. “Don’t wait for the authorities to
act!” warns Jo Soares, a late night talk-
show host, “The solution depends on
us alone.”
In the last two years, a growing
number of activists have taken such
advice to heart. Nearly 40 new organi-
zations have sprung up in response to
the AIDS epidemic. “With AIDS, it’s
become clear that [this government has]
no real commitment to the health of the
Brazilian people,” says sociologist
Herbert de Souza, the founder of the
country’s most prominent non-govem-
mental organization which deals with
the disease. ‘”This is apolitical issue for
which all of us must take responsibil-
ity.” For some, taking responsibility
means providing services to the sick;
for others, defending their civil rights.
But most conclude it means pushing the
government to act.
As a country, Brazil has the third
highest incidence of AIDS cases world-
wide. Although official statistics place
the number of people with AIDS at
around 7,000, doctors, academics and
activists say the figure is at least twice
that high and may be doubling every ten
months. Perhaps 500,000 Brazilians
carry the HIV virus.
When AIDS first appeared here in
1983, most Brazilians with the disease
were young, gay, educated, white men
from the big city. Many tried to dismiss
it as a doenga do desviado da Zona Sul,
an affliction that would only befall
“queers” from the affluent and tour-
isty southern neighborhoods of Rio de
Janeiro. But today more and more
heterosexuals, women, poor people,
drug users, small-town residents and
children are joining the ranks of those
who are ill or dying from the disease.
According to Dr. Mauro Schechter,
who heads AIDS research at the Fed-
eral University of Rio de Janeiro, in
1985 the ratio of men to women with
AIDS in Brazil was thirty to one; three
years later, it was eight to one. Schech-
ter also says that around 70% of Brazil-
ians with AIDS in 1985 held university
degrees; now, the figure is closer to
30%. In 1985, 72% of the country’s
AIDS cases lived in Rio de Janeiro and
Sio Paulo; last year it was just under
half.
The number of Brazilians with the
disease suddenly skyrocketed in 1986.
In that year Herbert de Souza, a hemo-
philiac, founded the Brazilian Inter-
Disciplinary AIDS Association
REPORT ON THE AMERICAS
Elizabeth Station is a writer and
translator living in Rio de Janeiro.
8(ABIA). ABIA’s early “safe sex”
materials targeted middle-class gays,
and were reminiscent of literature which
circulates on the streets of New York or
San Francisco. Now, ABIA produces
frank, explicit videotapes for use with
street kids and construction workers,
and distributes pamphlets equipped with
free condoms to sailors and dock work-
ers. The group also sends speakers to
Rio de Janeiro slums, schools and
workplaces.
Alarmed at the fact that 10%-20%
of AIDS cases originate from contami-
nated blood transfusions, ABIA activ-
ists also lobbied hard to insert a clause
in the country’s new constitution pro-
hibiting the commercialization of blood
and its derivatives. They were success-
ful, but most blood still comes from
unscrupulous private banks that do not
screen for malaria, Chagas’ disease,
syphilis, hepatitis or AIDS. Activists
complain that only wealthy patients can
get a pure transfusion, yet nothing
guarantees purity. De Souza himself is
HIV-positive; two of his brothers, also
hemophiliacs, died of AIDS in 1988.
Varig’s Surprise
“People with AIDS are the best
means to disseminate correct informa-
tion about AIDS,” says Herbert Daniel,
a writer, gay activist and ex-guerrilla
leader who, like de Souza, spent most
of the 1970s in exile. He discovered he
had AIDS earlier this year, and has
since joined with ABIA to found “Pela
VIDDA” (For the Valorization, Inte-
gration and Dignity of People with
AIDS)-the only group in Latin Amer-
ica which organizes people who have
the disease to demand their civil rights.
Pela VIDDA held its first public
demonstration in August, picketing the
downtown Rio de Janeiro offices of
Varig airlines for administering AIDS
tests to prospective employees without
the applicants’ knowledge or consent.
Worse yet, charged Pela VIDDA, when
those who test positive return to see if
they will be hired, they are told they
have the AIDS virus-and no job. A
Varig spokesman admitted the allega-
tions were true, and insisted that the
testing would continue.
Though illegal, it is common for
public and private hospitals to deny
treatment to AIDS patients, alleging
lack of space and specialization to deal
with the disease. Even when an emer-
gency AIDS patient is admitted, staff
members may refuse to go anywhere
near him. Insurance companies have
summarily bumped clients when it is
revealed they have AIDS. People with
AIDS or the HIV virus are frequently
fired from their jobs and are often aban-
doned by their families.
One objective of the Varig protest
was to fight the notion that aideticos-as
people with AIDS are often called in
Brazil-are social deviants or outcasts
on the verge of an inevitable, gruesome
and somehow deserved death. “Ever
since I found out I had AIDS, I repeat
constantly that I am alive and I’m a
citizen. I have no deficiency that immu-
nizes me against my civil rights,” says
Daniel, who rejects the term aidctico as
dehumanizing. Zeca Nogueira, a found-
ing member of Pela VIDDA who re-
cently lost his lover to the disease,
agrees. “We aren’t people dying of
AIDS; we aren’t victims of AIDS,”
Nogueira explains, “We’re people liv-
ing with AIDS. This is really a political
problem and we have to fight it politi-
cally.”
Private Initiative
Not all activists see political struggle
as an appropriate response to the AIDS
crisis. Three years ago, Ubiratan da
Costa e Silva began to take strangers
with AIDS who had nowhere else to go
into his Sdo Paulo home. He now
manages a group of 27 volunteers who
make house-calls to over 80 patients
throughout the city. “It’s not easy to
keep this work up,” admits the interior
decorator-turned-activist, pointing to
the tall metal shelf in his dining room
which is piled with bottles of antibiot-
ics, AIDS education materials, food
and medical books. “Until yesterday,
there was a piano there.” (He sold it to
Beijo da Rua activists talk to transvestites on Rio’s Rua Augusta
VOLUME XXIII, NO. 4 (NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1989)
I
ABIA’s Ranulfo Cardoso teaches street kids about AIDS
9Herbert Daniels of Pela VIDDA
raise money for the project.) Raffles,
book sales, donations and Costa e Silva’s
own savings have underwritten most of
the AIDS work he coordinates. “The
responsibility is ours, too; it’s not only
up to the government,” he says.
Transvestite Brenda Lee is the owner
of a house in an Italian district of Sdo
Paulo known as “The Palace of Prin-
cesses,” where for years transvestites
shared expenses and household tasks
while they weren’t out on the streets.
The city’s press discovered the house in
1984 after a group of thugs, probably
police, went on a shooting spree that
left several transvestite prostitutes dead.
Brenda then told reporters from a popu-
lar TV news program that she would
take in any prostitute or transvestite
who needed protection-including
those who had AIDS. “I said having
AIDS isn’t any worse than getting
gunned down in the street,” Brenda
recalls. Within days, she had opened
her doors to several patients whose
families refused to care for them.
The house has been a full-fledged
AIDS clinic since October 1988, when
the Sdo Paulo state secretary of health,
in an unusual collaboration, agreed to
cover most of the expenses that Brenda
previously struggled to pay on her own.
The house now provides food, medi-
cine and shelter for transvestites, home-
less gays and anyone else with AIDS
referred by the state health department.
Nurses, maids and most of the 24 pa-
tients under Brenda Lee’s roof usually
go about their daily routine in drag.
“When a family won’t accept them
because of prejudice, they come here,”
says Veronesa, a transvestite nurse’s
assistant who has worked at the house
for about a year. “These people are
abandoned,” adds Brenda. “It’s
terrible-we don’t have room for all
the patients.”
Brenda Lee and Costa e Silva are
quick to distance themselves from
“leftists who blame the government for
everything.” They believe that private
initiatives are the best hope for stop-
ping AIDS in Brazil. “I’m different
from everyone,” shrugs Brenda, “I hear
everyone complaining about the gov-
ernment, [but] I’ve learned that in gen-
eral, the community is never satisfied
with the government. If they all worked
as hard as I did, there wouldn’t be any
problem,” she says.
One of Many Disasters
Herbert Daniel is one of the few gay
activists working on AIDS to openly,
and proudly, admit his homosexuality.
The gay rights movement was tiny and
fragmented before AIDS hit the coun-
try, and it is hard to tell whether the
disease has helped or hurt its growth,
As in the United States and Europe, in
Brazil a few gay leaders have been able
to win mainstream recognition and
respect for their activities on behalf of
people with the illness. But only one
gay organization, located in the poor
northwest suburbs of Rio de Janeiro, is
openly attempting to address AIDS
from a gay perspective. The group,
“Atoba,” distributes 6,000 condoms a
month in plazas and gay bars, along
with flyers which read “Homosexual-
ity is not an illness! It’s not a crime, it’s
not a sin, nor a punishment! Find out
about and defend your rights.”
By most estimates, Brazil is at least
five years behind the United States and
Europe in terms of its response to AIDS.
Only a few AIDS groups have secured
funding from foreign foundations or
national agencies. Volunteer organiza-
tions like the Support Group for the
Prevention of AIDS (GAPA), which
has chapters in 12 Brazilian cities, run
hospices, distribute food and medicine,
make hospital visits and provide pa-
tients and their families with coun-
selling services. Members of Protes-
tant and Catholic churches also visit
and provide material aid to the sick,
although the Catholic rank-and-file
complain that the church hierarchy has
been slow in responding to the crisis. A
Rio de Janeiro-based group, Religious
Support Against AIDS (ARCA), is at-
tempting to form an ecumenical front
which includes Catholic, Protestant and
Brenda Lee [I.] takes AIDS patients into her Sio Paulo home
REPORT ON THE AMERICAS
i
10In a Sio Paulo hospice: Many people with AIDS are abandoned by their families
Jewish volunteers, as well as practi-
tioners of the Afro-Brazilian religions
Candomble and Umbanda.
Meanwhile, financially strapped
public hospitals, which treat 80%-90%
of AIDS cases, bear most of the burden.
Available beds fall far short of the total
needed; drugs like AZT are either un-
available or prohibitively expensive.
Federal funds for AIDS research and
lab equipment were drastically slashed
last year as part of a general cut in
spending on health and social services,
and training programs for hospital per-
sonnel are still inadequate. “I’m abso-
lutely certain that if I were a construc-
tion worker,” says Herbert Daniel, “I’d
already be dead.”
Dealing with AIDS on a day-to-day
basis has led doctors, nurses, social
workers and hospital administrators to
join the movement to demand a more
vigorous government response to the
epidemic. According to Dr. Ranulfo
Cardoso, the director of ABIA’s health
education program, “It doesn’t matter
how many hospices we open-the AIDS
issue is one for the government to face.”
Though he urges individuals to join the
fight, Cardoso points out that civil
society can’t clean up blood banks,
import AZT and create public hospital
beds unless these are also official pri-
orities.
Health professionals also point out
that, while serious, the AIDS epidemic
is only one of many disasters resulting
from Brazil’s failure to invest in public
health over the years. One in three people
has no access to health services, and
public hospitals suffer chronic short-
ages of funds, beds, drugs, ambulance
services, lab equipment and staff.
Ministry of Health statistics show that
preventable and treatable illnesses like
malaria, yellow fever and dengue still
run rampant. Over 2,000 Brazilians die
of syphilis and gonorrhea each year,
making these diseases bigger killers
than AIDS.
Activists and doctors agree that the
situation will not improve until the
Sarney administration leaves office in
early 1990. “President Sarney hasn’t
opened his mouth to say the word
AIDS,” complains one organizer, “It’s
as if he were afraid of getting contami-
nated.” None of the front-runners in
the race for this month’s presidential
elections has made concrete proposals
for dealing with AIDS or reforming the
public health system. The tiny Brazil-
ian Green Party, which has no chance
of winning the election, nearly chose
Herbert Daniel as its presidential candi-
date hoping he could draw attention to
the minority rights issues the Greens
have championed.
AIDS activists have picked up on
the Green Party slogan, “All Brazil is a
high-risk group,” from rubber tappers
to homosexuals to people attempting to
live on the minimum wage. According
to Herbert Daniel, people with AIDS
must join forces with those fighting to
obtain housing, education, decent wages
and human rights. As Daniel wrote
earlier this year, “My problem, like
thousands of other people with this
disease, is not to ask for easier condi-
tions for death but to demand a better
quality of life. A problem, by the way,
which is common to almost all Brazil-
ians.”
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