Neoliberal policies, HIV-related vulnerability and AIDS activism in Mexico

This presentation is based on a qualitative research that interrogated whether and to what extent the institutional dynamics that have emerged in Mexico as a consequence of neoliberal state policies have shaped the vulnerability and institutional violence to which people living with HIV have been exposed. Likewise, it interrogated the ways in which people living with HIV have organized as a social movement to deal with, contest and transform these forms of exclusion, subordination and institutional violence.

Using a hybrid theoretical framework that combines a neo-Marxian understanding of neoliberalism as a class power restoration project and a political process approach, this presentation: 1) will argue that the neoliberal reforms to the health care system implemented by the Mexican state over the last 20 years, along with a set of representations that imagine HIV as a ‘homosexual disease,’ have underpinned the forms of violence, displacement and vulnerability to which people living with HIV have been exposed, 2) will localize, describe and analyze the emergence and transformation of AIDS activism and its repertories of protest in relation to the broad social transformations in Mexican society, and 3) will contend that the struggles for social recognition and forms of redistribution, carried out by AIDS activists, along with other Mexican insurgencies (Zapatistas, sex workers, and displaced peasants), are obstructing the consolidation of the neoliberal project in Mexico. They do this by putting into practice a series of contentious politics that have generated institutional dynamics that guarantee forms of social inclusion, legal reforms that have expanded the constitutional right to the health care, and redistributive policies that have been beneficial to the sick and the needy in Mexican society.

20 in-depth interviews with AIDS activists were conducted, as well as primary and secondary data collected from official government documents, media reports, bibliographic and hemerographic material.