This page hopes to offer a glimpse at the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Latin America, an epidemic that has many faces and affects all sorts of social and ethnic groups throughout South and Central America, and the Caribbean. Between 1.6 and 2.1 million people are living with HIV in Latin America, and the situation is critical. Social stigma, lack of education, political turmoil, and economic disparities all have played crucial roles in the spread of the disease.

In Central America, for instance, the epidemic has hit hardest among socially marginalized populations, many of whom find themselves constantly migrating in search of work. In the Caribbean, there are over 430, 000 people living with HIV/AIDS. Some Caribbean countries have dangerously high prevalence of over 2%, like the Bahamas and the Dominican Republic. Haiti’s figures are even more shocking: national prevalence is around 5.6 %, the highest in any country outside of Africa.

In Central America and the Caribbean the primary mode of transmission is sex, both heterosexual and between men who have sex with men. Concentration of the disease is high among sex workers in countries like Nicaragua and Honduras, (where prevalence among female sex workers is over 10%). A marked exception to this trend is Puerto Rico, where injection drug users account for a large amount of the HIV+ population.

In South America, the numbers are also cause for concern. In Colombia, for instance, an HIV prevalence of 18% was recently reported among men who have sex with men in Bogotá, Colombia; investigators also found consistently low numbers of condom use within the same group. In Argentina, 24% of men who have sex with men are HIV positive. Brazil is home to more than 1 in 4 of all those living with HIV in Latin America. In some Brazilian cities, 60% of Injection drug users are infected with HIV.

The social stigma attached to the epidemic, the economic disparities among those infected, as well as the political turmoil found in many Latin American countries, all play decisive roles on how HIV/AIDS is viewed. The epidemic will not be stopped until those countries come to terms with the widespread realities of injecting drug use and male-to-male sex. The denying of such behavior has only led to the spread of a silent epidemic.

Awareness campaigns that battle the stigma and educate about testing and prevention, along with better epidemiological and behavioral surveillance data, are the only hope in the fight against HIV/AIDS throughout Latin America.

Source: UNAIDS, Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic, July 2004

UNAIDS, Fact Sheet 2002: Latin America and the Caribbean, December 2002.