Prejudice, Poverty Mark AIDS in Tijuana

The face of AIDS in Tijuana is a gaunt 19-year-old in a Raiders cap named Luis. His 16-year-old wife holds his hand as he describes how her mother threw them both out of the house when she learned they were infected.

“Even your own family rejects you,” Luis said in an interview at a free AIDS clinic. His eyes were stark, his speech fervent and slurred. “Sooner or later, people are going to have to learn that it’s a sickness like any other.”

The couple live on the money Olga earns as a scavenger at the municipal garbage dump. Luis has occasionally found shelter at Emilio’s, a cafe and center of gay activism. He and Olga get regular treatment and counseling at the 2-year-old free clinic on Avenida Constitucion run by U.S. and Mexican medical volunteers and gay activists, the only such facility in the city.

Gay leaders in Tijuana have found themselves on the front lines in helping people like Luis and Olga as overburdened social service and medical agencies find themselves unable to cope with even the basic needs of the general population, and with some health workers who believe myths about how AIDS is spread.

“When you realize that several thousand babies die every year of treatable diarrhea, what makes you think that people will spend money on treating AIDS?” said Mary McCarthy, an American nurse who helped start the clinic in a Mexican federal health center.

Mexican federal health officials say there are 174 reported AIDS cases in Tijuana, a city of more than 1 million. Experts believe the actual figure could be five times higher. Despite a new government task force on AIDS prevention, reporting, prevention and treatment are hampered both by the lack of resources and continuing fear and ignorance, said Dr. Jose Luis Lepe, the clinic director.

“They don’t want to admit AIDS patients in hospitals,” he said. “They don’t want to operate on them. There is rejection and discrimination.”

The stories of rejection are heard from patients, doctors, city officials: The dying male prostitute whose friends wrapped him in blankets and dumped him on a sidewalk, where Red Cross workers did not want to touch him; the 28-year-old who died recently in the city bus station, after wandering from Los Angeles to Southern Mexico and back to the border in search of relatives who would take him in; the nurses who don’t want to go near infected patients; the mortuaries that refuse to bury the dead.

The clinic was briefly shut down in 1989 by a new federal health administrator who reportedly said it would somehow spread the disease, but his supervisors ordered it reopened and dismissed the official after an outcry. Activists say their next goal is to open a hospice.