* Fresh update at LAWeekly.com. Update No. 2 here.
"A global AIDS conference that opens in Mexico City on Sunday is meant for people infected with HIV, but transsexual sex worker Elma Delea cannot get inside," begins this Reuters dispatch from the streets of D.F. (More good info and updates at AIDS2008.) For an event as large, international, and glittering as the XVII AIDS Conference this week, the chasms that exist between those forming policies and opinions and those affected still remain large. Especially, it seems, here in Mexico.
Sex workers in the capital have been protesting their lack of access to conference. The whole Reuters piece by reporter Tan Ee Lyn delves into the stigma and discrimination faced by sex workers and HIV/AIDS patients in Mexico City. In El Universal, testimony from a man named Javier Gonzalez:
I was diagnosed with HIV three years ago. I think it was because I had sexual relations without protection. I am bisexual. I have a spouse, children, grandchildren. Finding out was difficult, but now my family is understanding it. The government gives us free antiretrovirals, but there are other medicines we need that they don't have. There is a lot of discrimination, even from doctors. In the Clinic of the Condesa, where supposedly they are specialists, they try not to touch us, or examine you, they just seat us in a chair and ask us questions. People change when they learn you are a carrier.
Reporting to you at the moment at the conference site, Centro Banamex (the press room is huge), I'll be checking in here throughout the week and providing a few posts at my "Letter from Mexico City" at LA Weekly.com.
* Previously in Intersections, "Same-sex couples on display in Mexico City metro" and "Transsexual Mexicans, man and woman, to marry." * Image above, a 1997 photograph of an AIDS march in central Mexico City, by Francisco Mata.