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 AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF), the US' largest provider of HIV/AIDS healthcare, education and prevention hailed the news that the President of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, signed today a compulsory license for Merck's HIV/AIDS drug Efavirenz, freeing the country to buy a generic formula of the medication or produce it in its all state laboratories.
AHF also operates free AIDS treatment clinics in the US, Africa, Latin America/Caribbean and Asia. For them, Lula's move is seen as a victory for global AIDS activism and AIDS patients worldwide.
President Lula de Silva's decision comes after reports of a breakdown in negotiations between Brazil and the New Jersey based drug giant Merck. According to the country's health ministry, Brazil had asked Merck to cut the price of Efavirenz to 65 cents a pill from $1.57 and Merck had refused.
Brazil's decision to issue a compulsory license for the drug, which will allow the country to manufacture the drug or to buy generic versions, comes on the heels of Thailand's recent move to issue a compulsory license for Abbott's AIDS drug, Kaletra and in the lead-up to an AIDS Healthcare Foundation-hosted discussion regarding AIDS drug-pricing for Mexico, scheduled for June 4th in Mexico City.
"In announcing its intention to issue a compulsory license for Merck's AIDS drug Efavirenz, Brazil is once again leading the way to affordable AIDS drug access for every nation," added Michael Weinstein, President of AIDS Healthcare Foundation.
"We salute the courage of countries such as Brazil, Thailand and Mexico who are fighting to ensure drug access for AIDS patients the world over. Today is a victory for AIDS activists and patients everywhere, and proof that drug companies will go down in defeat every time they place themselves in the way of justice for AIDS patients."
Flexibilities under the World Trade Organization's (WTO) Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement allow governments to issue compulsory licenses (including royalty payment to the patent owner) if the country deems it necessary and appropriate to protect the health of its citizens.
Brazil has been widely praised by global AIDS treatment activists for its government AIDS program, which provides free medication for anyone who needs it.
In the Latin American region, AIDS Healthcare Foundation operates free HIV/AIDS treatment clinics in Guatemala (Quetzaltenango) and in Mexico (Tijuana and Puerto Vallarta).
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The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
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Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.