In the land of God and man

by Silvana Paternostro

As the daughter of the privileged Colombian elite, Paternostro was brought up to go from convent school to cocktail parties, obedient to God and man, never questioning the injustice she saw all around her. She left Latin America twenty years ago, but returned recently to Brazil to research a report on women and AIDS. There she was confronted with the startling fact that married, monogamous women were at much greater risk of being HIV-positive than female prostitutes. Interviewing a Colombian AIDS specialist, Paternostro found that 80 percent of his female HIV patients were infected because their husbands were having unprotected sex with other men. The AIDS epidemic was exposing what the author instinctively knew; that behind the silence, secrets, guilt, and shame about sex in staunchly Catholic Latin America is a paradoxical reality where prostitution, male bisexuality, and transvestism are routine and accepted parts of life at every level of society. A blend of history, painstaking re