“Ten years ago, our communities didn’t even know about HIV/AIDS,” said Eva Melgar Cociabó, one of the leaders of the Chiquitana Indigenous Organization, based in the lowland Santa Cruz department. “But three years ago people started talking about it more. Women who weren’t even leaving their houses in the villages were being infected with this deadly disease. Now, we’re all worried about it.”

 

Melgar’s worry is justified. HIV/AIDS is increasingly affecting Bolivian women. In the early 1990s for every 10 HIV positive men in Bolivia there was one infected woman. By 2001, women accounted for one in three cases of HIV, and some experts estimate that the disease affects both sexes equally today.

 

Rural indigenous women are highly vulnerable to infection: They live marginalized, in poverty, and many lack education and basic services. Few have access to information about health, sexual and reproductive rights, or modern health care for sexually transmitted diseases, such as HIV/AIDS.

 

The Chiquitana Indigenous Organization is maybe the one and only Bolivian indigenous group working on HIV prevention with a cultural and gender focus. Their project, supported partly by the non-profit Colectivo Rebeldía and Swedish Ecumenical Action, or Diakonia, works with communities near the borders of Paraguay and Brazil. Running only for a short while – May to December of this year – the project is still trying to make up for a lack of state health and educational programs aimed at preventing HIV in these communities.

 

“We’re trying to bring information to the most far-off places and we believe this should be done for all native peoples in the country,” said Melgar Cociabó.

 

 

“There isn’t even official information about the rate of HIV/AIDS among indigenous groups because health authorities never thought to do an evaluation, even for prevention campaigns that have focused on urban areas,” said Heidi Hochstätter, director of Epua Kuñataí (“Stand Up, Woman” in Guarani), an organization that works with women and children with HIV/AIDS.

 

In 2007, Epua Kuñataí along with CARE International conducted a study of the Chiquitana and Ayoreode people who live near a stretch of the Inter-Oceanic Highway that is still under construction known as Puerto Suárez-Santa Cruz and the railroad from the provinces of Chiquitos and Germán Busch where residents are often displaced or move around for employment opportunities, particularly the men, and where information about STDs is essential.

 

The study was a challenge, and did not result in clear information about the rate of HIV. Of the 250 people who participated in 26 workshops, 70 agreed to be interviewed. No one tested positive for HIV.

 

But the study illustrated the difficulties of HIV prevention in these communities. Machismo is a major factor.

 

“Before answering anything, the women looked at the men to see if they approved of what they said, explained Marioly Céspedes, who coordinated the study. “When we told [the men] that it was a gender issue they said ‘let the women deal with it then,’ but we explained to them that their participation was necessary because they could be the transmitters of the illness because they leave their communities to look for work in the cities.”

 

Céspedes noted that the opposite occurred in the Ayoreode communities, a matriarchal society where women have more sexual freedom.

 

“They were the ones with no problem asking us to explain about condom use,” she said.

 

Still, it’s not easy to be accepted and heard in the Ayoreode communities that only speak Zamuco, although the majority speaks Spanish.

 

“That shows us the importance of identifying social-cultural aspects, like language, gender roles and even the concept of health in each group before each initiative. We also realized that we needed someone from the ethnic group to give the explanations; we did more if we had the participation of their organizations and leaders,” she continued.

 

 

Virginia Pereira is the leader of the indigenous center Turubó, which will follow up and evaluate the work of the young sexual health promoters working with the Chiquitana Indigenous Organization.

 

“We have so little time to go to the communities, but it’s necessary because in hospitals or health centers that are closer they aren’t told how to protect themselves or what the risks of this illness are,” said Pereira. “These women are missing a lot of information that they want to know. Many of them don’t even go to health centers because they’re treated poorly for being indigenous.”

 

Family Care International along with the Indigenous Center of the Native Peoples of Pando, in northern Bolivia near the Brazilian border, studied five indigenous communities in the area – Cavineño, Ese-ejja, Machineri, Tacana and Yaminahua – and found similar problems caused by poverty and lack of education and proper health care.

 

The HIV rate in this area is unknown as well, but Melgar says if women take a greater initiative in participating and demanding these basics, there will be visible benefits.

 

“We women are more conscious than our male counterparts,” she said. “They believe that talking about this is a joke. In some places you talk about HIV and they confuse it with the IDH [the Direct Hydrocarbons Tax, for its initials in Spanish] that is always on the news. But if that’s how it is, we have to make people talking as much about HIV as they do about IDH.”

 

 —Latinamerica Press.