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Nineteen Latin American and Caribbean nations plan to act as a bloc to reduce the price of AIDS medication and will work together to produce the drugs themselves, Brazil's official news agency said Saturday. The announcement was made after a three-day meeting in Brasilia to discuss regional AIDS prevention. The conference's final report will be presented at the United Nations' General Assembly in May. "It's fundamental the countries unite ... to build effective mechanisms to produce medication locally," said Pedro Chequer, the head of Brazil's AIDS program. "The sole negotiation of price reduction won't guarantee sustainability in the long term." At the General Assembly, the countries will recommend people's access to AIDS prevention and treatment be measured and they will call for help from the international community to overcome political and economical barriers in price negotiations, the Agencia Brasil said. In recent years, Brazil has negotiated lower AIDS drug prices by threatening to break patents, without ever actually doing so. Last October, Brazil reached a deal with Illinois-based Abbott Laboratories Inc. (ABT) to lower the price on the AIDS drug Kaletra after threatening to break the patent and produce the drug itself at government laboratories. Chequer said at the beginning of the conference that Latin American countries that can't afford increasingly expensive AIDS medication should consider sidestepping foreign patent holders and manufacture the drugs themselves. According to World Trade Organization rules, countries can disregard patent rights after negotiating with the patent owners and paying them adequate compensation. But governments that declare a public health emergency can skip the negotiating. More

Twelve years after the indigenous people of Mexico’s southernmost state of Chiapas rose up in arms with the banner “Liberty! Justice! Democracy!” the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN in its Spanish initials) chose New Year’s Day 2006 to send its spokesman and Insurgent Subcomandante Marcos on a six-month tour of every corner of the Mexican Republic.The Mission: “To listen to the simple and humble people who fight,” said Marcos last August.  <>In Yucatán, where this tour arrives on Wednesday, January 18, simple and humble people who fight have fought for five hundred and more years.It took the Spaniards 170 years to conquer the Maya indigenous of this region, and the centuries since then have been no picnic for the parade of outside powers that have tried to impose their will here. Once the invaders established “control” they imposed a caste system — in which the Europeans and wannabe-Euros enjoyed more legal rights and freedoms over the natives — on this Caribbean Peninsula. To this day the mercantile elites of Mérida are known as “The Divine Caste,” (some even refer to themselves that way). Then, in 1847, after another century and a half of conquest, began the Caste War of Yucatán, in which the indigenous Maya chased the upper castes — Europeans, Mixed Blood (mestizo), and those who considered themselves “former Maya royalty” (your correspondent makes no endorsement as to whether such haughty claims of lineage were true) — out of every hamlet on the Peninsula to take refuge behind the then-walled fortresses of Mérida and Campeche (today, state capitals). It was a Caste War that, according to historians, took the invaders 85 years to extinguish. There’s more, much more, including the time, in 1918, when The Socialist Republic of Yucatán preceded the Russians in forming the first independent socialist state on earth (the U.S. had to send in the marines to quell it) and, kind reader, we will get to that in the coming two weeks, but first, the question of the hour More

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