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Shannon Coco

AIDS in Latin America -- A special report;In Deception and Denial, an Epidemic Looms - 0 views

partners.nytimes.com/...012593sci-aids.html

AIDS deception denial sexuality contraceptive condoms prices fidelity marriage

shared by Shannon Coco on 08 Sep 09 - Cached
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  • Flourishing amid sexual promiscuity, hypocrisy and haphazard prevention, Latin America's AIDS epidemic is on its way to surpassing that of the United States
  • among
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • ising infection rates among Latin American women, a fact that doctors attribute to a propensity for homosexual and heterosexual affairs by men and a traditional reluctance to discuss these with their wives
    • Shannon Coco
      Shannon Coco on 08 Sep 09
       
      This reminded me of when Gutmann discussed how men classified their sexuality on questionnaires. Some claimed to be "heterosexual" despite having sex with other men because they were the ones doing the penetrating. This logic baffled me and I was shocked to hear the reasoning, but yet I believe it to be driven by beliefs that since they were "the man" penetrating, they did nothing against their religion, the norm, etc.
  • "Married women always think that they are safe," said Ana Valeria Barbosa, whose husband died of AIDS two years ago. "Then I discovered my husband was not only injecting drugs, he was bisexual."
  • Indeed, hidden bisexual activity by Latin America's men has provided a bridge for the epidemic to enter the continent's f
  • provide
  • a's men has provided a bridge for the epidemic to enter the continent's
  • male population.
  • prevalent in Brazil, and in Latin America
  • "Bisexual behavior is more
  • in general, than in the U.S.,
  • Men here are not considered gay if they also have sexual relations with women, or perform the dominant role in the sex act. This is a main contributor to the rapid spread of AIDS among women."
    • Shannon Coco
      Shannon Coco on 08 Sep 09
       
      This once again states the logic of male-to-male sexual acts. If dominant (the man's role), going along with the perception of the way men should act in bed as the aggressor, than they are not considered gay.
  • In Africa, heterosexual sex is the primary means of transmission and victims are evenly split between men and women. In the United States, primary modes of transmission have been gay sex and injection of drugs with contaminated needles,
  • In Rocinha, Rio's largest slum, 77 percent of sexually active male respondents to a survey said they never used condoms.
    • Shannon Coco
      Shannon Coco on 08 Sep 09
       
      The men will not take it upon themselves to use contraception or to prevent AIDS.
  • In addition to objections on grounds of pleasure, Brazilian men fault condoms for their high price and their poor quality. Priced out of reach of Brazil's poor majority, a pack of three condoms costs the equivalent of a kilogram (2.2 pounds) of rice or two kilograms of black beans.
  • "Many married men get AIDS from homosexual behavior and from prostitutes they don't publicly acknowledge," said Marta Suplicy, a Sao Paulo psychoanalyst who specializes in sexual problems. "One of the big problems of AIDS is that there is still the myth of fidelity in marriage."
  • Shannon Coco on 08 Sep 09
     
    In this article from The New York Times in January 1993, the rise of AIDS in women in Latin America is discussed. Similarly to in Gutmann's findings, the fidelity of husbands is questioned as the reason for the rise in women's infections. With men having sexual affairs, they are contributing to the rise of AIDS in females.
Arabica Robusta

Adrienne Pine and David Vivar: Saving Honduras? - 0 views

www.counterpunch.org/pine10152010.html

honduras us intervention coup neoliberalism caceres

shared by Arabica Robusta on 16 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • They say that following the coup, Cáceres, working with the pro-coup Marrder family that controlled the HTW website, deceitfully wrested control from the Gutierrez family which had founded the paper and until then had maintained editorial control.
  • The Marrders eventually decided to found Honduras weekly as a competing newspaper, with Cáceres as editor. Stanley Marrder, listed on its website as "Owner and publisher of Honduras Weekly," is a Texan businessman and large Republican donor who grew up in Honduras. As they watched their own paper go under, the staff and owners of HTW darkly joked that they too had been victims of a coup.
  • HTW had been a printed and online English-language newspaper aimed at tourists and investors, employing journalists. Honduras Weekly, by contrast, is a blog that does not employ any trained journalists or paid staff, although you would not know that from its "about" page. In a tally last week, of forty-one "guest contributors," fourteen were evangelical missionaries who had each written one travelogue in classic "Heart of Darkness" style. Here is an example: After months of prayerful, "Jonah and the whale" thoughts, I booked my ticket to La Ceiba, Honduras this past weekend and no longer retain a wussy status. This gives my 'I don't leave home well' feelings a whole new slant. I'm flying out with the Vision Honduras team from Dassel, Minnesota on March 3 for a volunteer eye care mission that will last 19 days, carrying only what I can fit into a backpack.
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  • Cáceres uses deceptive tactics like these specifically to prop up an illusion of balance in a blog masquerading as a newspaper, but which is really Cáceres' personal soapbox. In a similar vein, Cáceres recently quoted me out of context in a way that made the quote appear to support his work in a press release promoting his book, written for the 700 club.
  • One of the articles recently republished to appear to look like it was written for HW was titled "US, Honduran Soldiers Partner on Medical Mission to Colón," describing a "humanitarian" mission to the community Guadalupe Carney, written by Alex Licea .Two important facts are left out in the article: first, that SOUTHCOM specifically targets communities like Guadalupe Carney, named for the revolutionary priest and martyr, that are united in their resistance to the coup and U.S. imperialist policy for its "aid" efforts, and secondly, the full attribution of the article, reprinted from SOUTHCOM's website and written by Sgt. 1st Class Alex Licea, SOCSOUTH PAO [Public Affairs Officer].
  • Cáceres has been an enthusiastic supporter of SOUTHCOM's operations in Honduras, and Joint Task Force Bravo, and Bravo has returned that enthusiasm, even sponsoring his annual conference in 2008, themed "Building Global Partnerships: Implementing MDG 8 in Honduras." According to a participant at the conference, Cáceres proudly described to his audience the process that led up to the partnership, explaining that a director at DARPA who had been on a mission trip to Honduras with his church and "fell in love" with the country arranged for SOUTHCOM to allocate a substantial sum of money for the conference.
  • a woman from Task Force Bravo spoke. She proceeded to describe what they did as well as how they help humanitarian efforts. But she also gave a short history of the base. She stated that the base was there in the 1980s to combat aggression. That deeply affected me because I know the role of the US government at that time and have seen the effects of US support of Central American regimes like Honduras and El Salvador in that time.
  • As described on an earlier version of its website, the goal of Cáceres's conference is "to inform, inspire and to generate creative thinking about ways to help Honduras through grassroots projects aimed at providing the Honduran people with some basic abilities to live, learn, and grow... so that eventually they are in a better position to solve the problems of their society." The Social Darwinist assumption implicit in this description (as in the missionary travelogues posted on Honduras Weekly) is that Hondurans have not been able to solve the positions of their society for cultural and developmental reasons-rather than military and economic imperialism. Cáceres insists in his writings and in official conference propaganda that the work is apolitical, but this is of course an impossibility in today's Honduras.
  • While these and other individuals representing the U.S. State will be presenting, the vast majority of individuals attending come from reactionary evangelical groups, promoting charity work based on a premise of "apolitical" salvation that stand in direct opposition to the vibrant Honduran resistant movement's goals of justice and self-determination.
  • Why is USAID ("From the American People") officially sponsoring the Conference on Honduras this year? It's not because the NGOs involved are doing any good; they aren't. In their acceptance of a Social Darwinist model that identifies poverty as the result of a lack of "empowerment" and human capital, they can't.
  • In ignoring those voices, they refuse to address the roots of the problem. Instead, they provide ideological cover for a neoliberal agenda, promoting a Protestant ethic of individual responsibility that eschews notions of social justice, participatory democracy and the public good.
  • why, then, does the U.S. State support Cáceres? It is because he, like the NGOs he promotes, has been a truly effective tool in whitewashing the neoliberal undermining of democracy in Honduras, and the role of U.S. policy and military in it. Cáceres' advocacy is Clinton's Smart Power, combining institutions of military force and media and Non-Profit Industrial Complex coercion to undermine democratic processes in the interest of supporting the corporations that funded and have benefited from the coup. And indeed, as long as we don't focus on the pro-corporate, anti-democratic golpista praxis in our own government, as the State Department employee I met on the train said, our fingerprints are all over that.
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