Left Field by Patricia Nell Warren
While some people in the world look at AIDS as a huge humanitarian challenge, others still have an inhumane policy towards people with AIDS. Their actions have the effect of declaring “open season” on these vulnerable populations—a perceived notion that it’s okay to mistreat them, and a firm belief that they won’t be called to account.
Puerto Rico continues to be a trouble spot. Readers will remember Puerto Rico as the place where the first major convictions came down on criminals who embezzled millions of dollars in Ryan White funds. I have yet to see an official accounting of the cost in lives and health that these crimes precipitated against low-income people in Puerto Rico. Now activists José Colón and Anselmo Fonseca, who head the activist organization PLWHA, tell me that some ugly issues are boiling up around the Planning Council in San Juan.
In a recent release PLWHA alleged that there are serious conflict of interest problems around new appointments to the council. They wrote: “PLWHA activists, with the help of civil rights agencies, will formally file a complaint before the federal Health Department (HRSA) in Washington D.C.…The municipality of San Juan, Puerto Rico [and] Mayor Jorge Santini is hell bent on discriminating, marginalizing and persecuting former [Council] members as well as intimidating current Planning Council Members, by inserting a political figure on the Planning Council as a non-elected Community Leader. [Dr. Myriam Ramirez de Ferrer] is really an employee contracted by Mayor Santini to serve as his right hand in health-related issues. These incidents once again demonstrate a clear attempt to silence the voices of real HIV/AIDS community leaders.”
When Colón talked to me, he added that the old Planning Council had been dissolved, and a new Council packed with further appointees. According to Colón, the controversial appointee to the new Council has no track record on AIDS, leaving Puerto Rican PWAs feeling very nervous about whether she will represent their needs in an accurate and positive way.
Most Americans remain unaware of these uproars in Puerto Rico because our mainstream media seldom bother to report news from the island.
On other fronts, there are reports of ongoing brutality against AIDS patients in a number of countries. In Zimbabwe, according to Human Rights Watch, the government has been conducting a campaign of evictions and forced removals to rural areas of around 700,000 urban people that it considers “filth.” These include many people with AIDS, who have been left without shelter or treatment. In Brazil, Amnesty International reports, “Claudio Orlando dos Santos, a gay man, who was developing full-blown AIDS and who worked on HIV prevention with transvestite prostitutes, was beaten by the military police and subsequently hospitalized. He died in hospital. The police inquiry into his ill-treatment was closed and no one was ever charged.”
Meanwhile, from China, there was a report that two women with AIDS were beaten by police using electric prods. The women were assaulted after they protested the politically motivated arrest of another AIDS patient.
Not to be outdone, the United States has to face up to AIDS-related brutality of its own. Not beatings by police, but a more subtle kind of brutality, where bureaucrats and medical professionals appear to forget that they are there to serve the public.
According to the Alliance for Human Research Protection (AHRP), the federal Office of Human Research Protection has finally determined that Columbia University Medical Center and New York/Presbyterian Hospital had failed to follow federal regulations safeguarding the welfare of children in foster care when they experimented with AIDS drugs on a number of New York-area children. It took the feds two years to make this determination, following a huge scandal about the use of foster children in AIDS-drug clinical trials in a number of states, including black and Latino children at the Catholic-owned Incarnation Children’s Center in New York City. The feds sent the two medical institutions a letter to that effect.
Two years. And will there be any fines or arrests for those who violated the health and bodily privacy of foster children in this way? There are many ways in which an established regime can declare “open season” on vulnerable populations. For some, it’s beating them and driving them from their homes. For others, it’s simply pretending that justice has already been done.
Author of fiction bestsellers and provocative commentary, Patricia Nell Warren has her writings archived at www.patricianellwarren.com. Reach her by e-mail at patriciawarren@aol.com.
April 2006
Copyright (c) 2006 by Patricia Nell Warren. All rights reserved.
