Today's Stories: Brazil sets example for taming AIDS Mexico, Italy join efforts against organized crime A united world? Benetton and native Indians of Patagonia clash over land Confrontation in Venezuela: the "totalitarian" leader against "imperialism"

Football fever as Peru hosts Copa. Latin America's version of Euro 2004, the Copa America, kicks off in Peru on Today. The football-mad nation hopes staging the tournament will improve its international image, but others are not convinced.

“If you look over the map of HIV/AIDS in Latin America, it looks like the African map from 15 years ago,” said Paulo Lyra, a consultant on Latin America for the Pan American Health Organization.

“But what's different with Latin America is that it is by far the developing region with the most access to antiretroviral treatment.”

Antiretroviral drugs reduce the HIV in the bloodstream, making HIV infection a chronic disease rather than a terminal one.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, about 400,000 people are believed to need AIDS drugs and about 55 per cent are getting them. In Africa, an estimated 4.4 million people need drugs, but only 2 per cent are getting them.

The biggest success story is Brazil, thanks to a crisis-management program that has been praised by AIDS experts.

With a population of nearly 180 million, Brazil has by far the largest number of patients. By manufacturing cheap generic versions of the otherwise expensive AIDS drug cocktail and offering them free to all who need them, the country has put itself at the forefront of Latin America's war on AIDS.

Brazil's drug industry faced a threat when the country entered the World Trade Organization, which mandates compliance with trademark rules. It was able, however, to negotiate deep discounts with pharmaceutical makers simply by threatening to break the rules if treatments became too costly.

Brazil was a global pioneer in the manufacture of cheap generic AIDS drugs and still manufactures those patented before it signed its intellectual-property law. It distributes these to patients who have not yet developed resistance and need more advanced drugs.

Brazil spends about 1.5 per cent of its health budget, equivalent to about $230-million Canadian a year, on anti-AIDS drugs.

The giveaway cut the death rate in half in just four years, saving an estimated 100,000 lives. Since then, the death toll has crept back up, but only gradually.

In 2002, the last year for which numbers are available, 11,047 Brazilians died from the disease, only slightly more than the 11,024 who died in 1997.

In 1990, the World Bank estimated Brazil would have 1.2 million people infected with HIV by 2000. Today, authorities estimate the total is about half that many.

Proportional to population, Brazil has had far less than its share of the 100,000 people who died of AIDS across Latin America and the Caribbean last year.

Its neighbours have taken heart from Brazil's example.

Experts who argued that treatment was too expensive and complicated in the largely impoverished region now hold up Brazil's program as a model.

The Brazilian government funds five pilot programs in Latin America, providing free anti-AIDS drugs and expertise.

Most of these programs treat only about 100 patients, except in Bolivia and Paraguay, where the total number of patients is only about 500. Brazil treats nearly everyone.

Also contributing to Brazil's success is its frank, often graphic AIDS propaganda, and the distribution of millions of free condoms at festivals such as the Mardi Gras carnival.

Still, some 80 per cent of Brazilians are Roman Catholic, and although their church has not come out strongly against the condom program, distribution is less widespread outside the cities.

There are no guarantees that Brazil has been spared for good, warns Mauro Teixeira, an adviser with the Brazil Anti-AIDS program.

He points to the tiny southern African kingdom of Swaziland, which he says had a 4-per-cent infection rate 10 years ago and today is at 40 per cent.

“There's nothing to say there won't be an explosion, if something isn't done,” he said.

Mexico, Italy join efforts against organized crime
Mexico and Italy Monday signed an agreement on jointly combating organized crime in Rome, news from Rome reaching here reported.

Under the memorandum of understanding signed by Mexico's Attorney General Rafael Macedo de la Concha and Italian anti-mafia director Piero L. Vigna, the two countries will exchange information and technical assistance in the fight against organized crime and drug trafficking.

Macedo told the press after talks with Vigna that there is a possibility of having communication and information on organized crime operating in Italy and Mexico.

"The basic idea is that we depend on real-time information and could jointly work in any action against criminal organizations in an immediate way without bureaucratic delay," Macedo said.

Vigna said that international cooperation is fundamental to combating organized crime which has become internationalized.

Italy has signed similar agreements with over 20 countries.

A united world? Benetton and native Indians of Patagonia clash over land
Their advertising campaigns featuring Aids victims and death-row inmates are a fading memory, but the Italian clothing company Benetton has established itself in the public imagination as a right-on, progressive sort of outfit. Its "United Colours of Benetton" slogan encapsulates its vision of the world as one big, happy, sweater-wearing family.

Now, however, the group is the target of fierce criticism in Argentina following a successful bid to throw an impoverished indigenous family off the company's land. "United colours of land grab," they are calling it.

Benetton became the biggest landowner in Argentina in 1997, when it bought 2.2 million acres (900,000ha) of land in Patagonia, the immense, empty zone in the far south of the country made famous by Bruce Chatwin's travelogue. Empty is how the land appears because of its vast undifferentiated vistas, but if it is also empty of people that's because big colonial landlords have been working to make and keep it that way for 500 years. The beaming, people-loving, inclusive Benetton brothers come at the end of a long and notably ruthless history.

The indigenous people, the Mapuche, also called the Gente de la Tierra (People of the Earth) have made Patagonia their home for 13,000 years, historians believe. But they were chased off the land and reduced to poverty by the Spaniards, and have been the victim of invasions, massacres and land grabs ever since. The most notorious was in 1879, when more than 1,300 Mapuche were killed and their lands confiscated for British settlers.

Free market reforms backed by President Carlos Menem in the 1990s encouraged wealthy North Americans and Europeans to pile into Patagonia, tempted by its low prices and Argentina's newly open economy; among the new landlords are celebrities such as Sylvester Stallone, Ted Turner, Jerry Lewis and George Soros. When Benetton, or more correctly its family-owned holding company Edizione Holding Spa, in 1991 bought out the British-owned Compania Tierras Sud Argentina, it became the biggest landlord of them all.

Much of its land was used to graze 280,000 sheep, whose wool went into the firm's sweaters. And to prove that its heart was still in the right place, in 2002 it opened the Leleque Museum, in the village of that name, "to narrate the culture and history of a mythical land". Carlo Benetton was reported as saying on taking possession of his new domain: "Patagonia gives me an amazing sense of freedom."

But Benetton appears to give their surviving Mapuche neighbours an amazing sense of imprisonment. Atilio Curinanco was born in Leleque, less than a kilometre from where Benetton's new museum now stands.

He moved with his wife Rosa and their four children to the nearby town of Esquel to look for work, but, battered like so many in the slump that followed Argentina's crisis of 2001, they decided to go back to the land, to try to scratch a living again in the old way.

They set their sights on 740 acres of unoccupied land called Santa Rosa, land that traditionally belonged to the Mapuche, located next to a Benetton holding. In December 2001 they went to the Instituto Autaqquico de Colonizacion (IAC), a state-managed property agency, to ask permission to occupy the land. Eight months later, in August 2002, the IAC told them the property was "zoned commercial" and the agency intended to "reserve it for a micro-enterprise". Mr and Mrs Curinanco took that as a green light. They presented themselves at the local police station to say they planned to occupy the land, and the same day they and a group of friends moved in and started work.

As Mr Curinanco said later: "We went to the land without harming anyone. We didn't cut a fence. We didn't hide. We waited for someone to come and let us know if it bothered them."

In less than a month, however, the "Compania", as Benetton is known locally, notified the couple that the land was theirs and that they intended to take it back. Within two months the police had moved in, seized their belongings and dismantled their new home.

Regardless of the legal small print, the case was not looking good for Benetton's carefully constructed image, promulgated in its 7,000 retail outlets in 120 countries, and as soon as the story hit the press, in November 2002, the vice-president of the Compania met the Curinancos and tried to strike a deal. Benetton would drop charges against them, he said, if they would stop trying to recover the land. The Curinancos refused.

Last month the case came to court in the southern province of Chubut, with the couple accused of usurpation. After Benetton's first two witnesses recanted their previous testimony and denied that the couple had cut fences or entered the land by night, the criminal charge was dropped. But the family was told that they must give up the land because it belongs to the Compania.

Today, nearly two years after the eviction, the land is again empty and unused. "For us, democracy has not yet arrived," a leader of the Mapuche, Mauro Millan, lamented after the hearing.

Confrontation in Venezuela: the "totalitarian" leader against "imperialism"
Venezuela"s political crisis heats up as government and opposition launch campaigns for August 15 referendum on the continuity of President Hugo Chavez.
The poll organized by the US organizations, says Chavez would win by ten points.

His foes say he is a totalitarian leader aiming to turn the country into a "Castro-communist rule"; he and his followers believe the internal opposition is acting as part of an imperialist force led by US President George W. Bush, which is trying to crash a democratic revolution in world's fifth oil exporter. Today, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is the center of a political turmoil which began more than two years ago, when the opposition led a military coup to oust him, but the coup was frustrated, took the lives of hundreds of people and created huge losses to the national economy.

The "Battle of Venezuela" entered into a new chapter last weekend when the National Electoral Council authorized the government and the opposition to launch campaigns for August 15 referendum on whether Chavez should continue in office. The recall vote, may be a transcendental stage in the fight, but everything seems to tell that it would not be the last one.

Rallies have been held around the country, and advertisements were aired on radio and television. The campaign is being hold in the streets and in the media, where the opposition controls powerful private groups and the government stands firm from the public system.

Cities are divided; the richest areas of Caracas -country's capital - hate Chavez" supporters, as poorest districts fully back the president. No one dares to campaigns in enemy's territory. During the weekends, hundred of thousands rally to listen to Chavez words, as hundred of thousands join to ask him to resign.

The opposition said it would work tirelessly to oust the constitutional president. But speaking to thousands of supporters, President Chavez maintained he would be victorious. "The real rivals we are facing are the imperialist forces", says Chavez and points out to Washington, where the US State Department prays for Chavez defeat.

"He is trying to turn Venezuela into a Castro-communist rule", says the opposition about the "democratic revolution" Chavez leads, a process known as "Bolivarian Republic", named after Venezuela's main historical figure. This heterogeneous mix of businessmen, local and international monopolies, media groups and right-wing political parties express local urban middle and upper classes wishes. They are tired of Chavez's populist rhetoric and his progressive social plans that brought down food and medicine prices and opened schools for millions of excluded people.

The opposition needs at least 3.7 million votes in order to have the president recalled, which is the amount of votes Chavez obtained when became re-elected in 2000. Polls, as everything in today"s Venezuela, are divided. A local opinion poll in June suggested that Chavez would lose out to the opposition 57.4% to 42.6%. But poll by a US firm published on Friday suggested the president was leading 57% to 41%.

If the opposition gets enough votes, elections would be held in a month and the victor would finish President Chavez's term which runs until January 2007. If Chavez wins, he will complete his mandate and has already expressed his will to run for one further period. Anyway, no matter who wins on August, the "Battle of Venezuela" will go on, as the opposition does no look like ready to acknowledge a defeat, and the popular process lead by Chavez has gone so far to be abruptly finished.