La Casa de la Sal

Centre for child victims of AIDS.  Mexico trip February 2009

A not-for-profit organization founded in 1986 by education specialist Rosa Maria Rivero, La Casa de la Sal is a center for child AIDS victims. The center, located in Mexico City, provides psychological, pedagogical and educational support. Its goal is to increase life expectancy, which is limited by a deprived environment, i.e. a social background that does not enable access to antiretroviral treatments, education and schooling providing an opening to the labor market. According to the national center for AIDS prevention and control (Censida), almost 3,000 children are infected in Mexico. Mexico is the second-most affected country in Latin America after Brazil. 55,000 of the 1.7 million people living with AIDS in Latin America are under 15 (figures: UNAIDS 2008). Of the 316,608 adults infected in Mexico, 23% are women of child-bearing age. “Children probably represent the most invisible population in the fight against AIDS”, states Ana Luisa Escalante, President of La Casa de la Sal. In March 2009, during Carla Bruni-Sarkozy’s visit to Mexico, Margarita Zavala de Calderon, Mexico’s First Lady, invited her counterpart to visit the center. Maria Villanueva Medina, who runs the clinic, confirmed that children with HIV in Mexico are extremely isolated: “Condemned to live in secret, they cannot talk about their status at school for fear of being excluded. They are stigmatized and they cannot talk about it in their communities either. “