AIDS Alibis: Sex, Drugs, and Crime in the Americas

4. Prostitution South

A IDS in Belize 1990 is a story of sex, money, and travel. There was no significant level of intravenous drug use. Crack-cocaine was nipping at the edges, but alcohol and marijuana continued to be the most popular choices. Although each of these substances may decrease the likelihood of sexual risk reduction , none are directly implicated in transmission. The blood supply was supposedly safe. It was a good time for the government to make AIDS prevention a priority. The epidemic still hadn't hit hard. If prevention is effective, maybe it never would. I thought it would be useful to focus on conditions that put masses of people at risk, rather than focus on the individual (the should-I-or shouldn't-I-use-a-condom dilemmas). I thought about how human populations move HIV from one continent to another, all those sexually active bodies leaping oceans for work and vacation in predictable ways. What happens when transnational circuits of power, pleasure, and infection link up with local, and as yet uninfected , sexual networks? This was a good plan, and in small countries there is a greater chance that an ethnographer's institutional interventions might actually have an effect. I believe that this turned out to be the case in Belize. Of course, knowing that you can have an impact is different from predicting what the nature of that impact will be. Even in small countries, the complicated politics of intervention reduce the 59 Copyrighted Material • CHAPTER 4 :.: a: o ~ predicrability of insrirurional response. Once you ser somerhing in morion, you lose wharever control you rhoughr you had. Transmission Circuits Peace and rhe mighty U.S. dollar draw people in to Belize from surrounding Spanish-speaking countries. As rhe STD clinic records indicare , fear of HIV among migrants, immigrants, and refugees may nor be torally unwarranted. Bur focusing on rhem to rhe exclusion of orher caregories of mobile persons is a way of avoiding discussion about one's own cirizens and benefactors. Projecting fear ontO others is a form of denial as likely to overtake insriturions as individuals. Foreigners are always moving rhrough Belize: There are tourists and sailors; people in business and government; milirary personnel from Brirain, Nepal, and rhe Unired Srares; Belizean soldiers who leave on missions to straregic ports; J Belizean civilians who work in rhe United States and come back to visir or rerire.2 These rransnational flows doubtless include persons from areas of high HIV seroprevalence , many ofwhom gladly supporr Belize's thriving sex indusrry and many ofwhom find nonprofessional sex partners. Making rhe case that conditions for large-scale HIV transmission exist is not enough to induce a commitment to narionwide AIDS prevention programs, however. There are acrive barriers to instituting prevention. The Catholic Church, for example, provides rhe financial backbone of social services nationally, particularly educarion. Where church docrrine contradicts basic teners ofAIDS prevention, as in discussions of homosexuality and condoms, ir is not unusual for healrh professionals to capitulate to rhe church. The people's representatives in government provide anorher example. Many think they are there to encourage industry and national (military) security above all else. There are rich incentives to ignore AIDS. Above all is an institutional will to ignorance. Using my preliminary research as a point ofdeparture , I had hoped to tear a hole in the masks. Given my quesrions, 60 Copyrighted Material PROSTITUTION SOUTH . constraints and goals, prostitution provided the most accessible sites to focus my inquiries. The British VD Doc I went to the largest base of the British forces, on the road west of town, just past the bar where the owner told me the story about women fucking dogs. I had an appointment with the man they call VD doc, who was actually a med tech. At last count (1988), he said there were twelve HIV infections among the soldiers. (But as the British do not test recruits, a vast area of uncertainty exists, I added.) The troops were taking six-month turns in Belize. They were tested only if they came into the clinic about some other STD or if they were worried. VD doc said that AIDS was not high risk in Belize, so the soldiers didn't have to worry. But did the people here have to worry about the soldiers, I asked? Perhaps they were coming from areas of high HIV prevalence, Edinburgh, for example, a city with a...