Aids in Chile

Chile has a higher rate of AIDS infection than any other country in South America. On top of that, 90% of chilenas (Chilean women) with aids were infected by a boyfriend or husband from a relationship of at least five years. While I don’t have the data to back up the next part; the explanation for this is that a lot of Chilean men have sex with prostitutes and then with their spouse. While I knew that Chile had problems with AIDS, until I learned these facts, I never realized just how much it affects women in particular. If you live in the US and you know anything about modern Chilean society there is a good chance that you have heard that Chile has a female president. You probably haven’t heard about what I think can only be classified as “Chile’s AIDS epidemic.”

For those of you interested in Spanish “chilenas”, means Chilean women where as “chilenos” would be Chilean men. In Spanish, nationalities should always be written in lowercase. Go to the official websitefor all things Spanish Real Acemedia Española if you don't believe me. However the influence that English has had on Spanish has made it more common to see words like “chileno” spelled with a capital “c”. I admit that occasionally my pen or typing finger slips and I end up writing nationalities in Spanish with upper case letters.
In my personal experience American female exchange students, many of which mean well, tend to only further damage the US’s image. I was an exchange student in a public Chilean college (la PUCV) for a semester. This college had a lot of exchange students and the female ones were pretty much obsessed with talking about “the position of Chilean women in today’s society”. I think that learning how to observe, analyze and criticize another country is a wonderful opportunity. Of course before doing any of those things you should learn the language and about the culture of whatever country it is that you are planning on dissecting. I don’t have any problem with talking about the problems that Chile or chilenas face. However, I was totally offended by the way a lot of female American exchange students talked about Chilean women. It was as if they were saying “oh you poor little thing, you don’t know what’s best for you”. They seemed to think that they had much better and happier lives just because there is less sexism in the US. I am totally aware of the fact that not all American female exchange students act like that, however, when my translation professor (who is a Chilean woman) read this her reaction was “American female exchange students talking about Chilean women as if they were ‘poor little things’ is a big problem.” My point is I’m not just making this up.
I can already hear the protests from some US women who have been in Chile denouncing my translation professor as “anti-gringa” or xenophobic. Well, she is no such thing. Her best friend is a woman from the US.
All things considered I do think it’s fair to say that Chilean women face more challenges than their US counterparts.

Here’s an example of why that is.

Most Chileans think that I am crazy for living in Valparaíso that it is way too dangerous. (If you wan some background info, here are Wikipedia's article on Valparaíso and a good blog about Valparaiso) Chileans consider Valparaíso about as safe as Americans consider South Central LA to be. I think that, in this case a lot of Chileans don’t have any idea what they’re talking about. After two years in downtown Valparaíso I have never been robbed. You’re probably thinking, what does where I live have to do with the problems Chilean women face? Well, because my girlfriend has been robbed and that doesn’t just represent her own personal experience. A lot more women get robbed here then men. Which lead me to invent a dark joke, which translates into something along the lines of “In Chile, even thieves are sexist.”

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. I don’t have any pictures to represent the way AIDS affects Chile, so I had to settle for “normal pictures.”

(I took this picture of a hillside a couple of blocks from a big supermarket in the middle of the city.)



(This is one of Valparaíso’s principle streets with the Chilean Congress in the background.)

(The intersection of Pedro Montt and Uruguay)


The fact that Chile is a developing country is inseparable from the problems that women in Chile do and don’t face. Every time that a country experiences economic growth, as Chile has in recent years, foreign workers come in to support the “nouveau riche”(or “new money”). Much like other countries, such as the US, the advances of some women in Chile, who have made it to a higher position, frequently come as a result of the sacrifice made by other less fortunate women. In the US these women tend to be Mexican or from some other Latin American country while in Chile they tend to be from Bolivia and Peru. They are, for all intents and purposes, “second class citizens”. In Chile, women make up the grand majority of these foreign workers so while this is a big issue for Chile as a whole it is an even bigger issue for the women who work and live here, even if they were not born in Chile.
There are some who call Chile an "undeveloped" or "3rd world" country. I will explain in greater detail why I don’t believe this in another article. However I think the fact that Peruvians and Bolivians risk their lives to live in Chile is one of the things that makes Chile a 2nd and not a 3rd world country. If Chile is a 3rd world country, does that mean that we should invent a new term “4th world country” to classify Peru and Bolivia? The annual median salary in Chile is approximately $6,000 meanwhile in Peru many doctors make $1,200 a year.
At an international level we talk about the advances that women have made and when Chile elected a female president, Michelle Bachelet, the US media made Chile out to be - a country, which had made huge leaps forward in terms of women’s rights. There is however a darker side to this issue. Does the progress, or lack there of, that we see reflect women, in particularly Chilean women, as a whole or does it just reflect a small minority? Have we seen a revolution, or have we just exaggerated the small changes that we see? While the whole world may be mulling over the answers to these questions, these are particularly pertinent questions for Chile.