Fighting for PrEP: The Politics of Recognition and Redistribution to Access AIDS Medicines in Brazil

Abstract

This chapter addresses, through a historical perspective, the role of organised civil society in the struggle for access to HIV medicines in Brazil. Through the concepts of recognition and redistribution, the text analyses how recognition of the rights of people living with HIV and the participation of the AIDS social movement in policymaking were decisive factors for the establishment and sustainability of universal access to treatment in the country. It demonstrates how activism has created policy spaces for participation in the formulation and expansion of access policies and democratised processes of incorporation, purchasing and production of medicines. During the course of the past decade, emerging activism around new HIV prevention methods, such as PrEP, has revealed that expanded access to these technologies depends on the fight against both moral and market barriers. This chapter also analyses how debates on PrEP and other new prevention technologies are reshaping HIV/AIDS activism in the twenty-first century. Finally, the chapter points out how the current increasingly conservative political context and the setbacks in democracy in Brazil and elsewhere may mean less recognition of civil rights and threats to universality in access to medicines and prevention tools.