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 The Catholic Church—which is against the use of condoms
and other contraceptives in any circumstance—condemned
the official campaign against AIDS alleging that you cannot
put an angel and a devil together the way it was done.
By Émerson Luís
If there's a time of intense work for angels and devils it has to be the four days of
Carnaval in Brazil. As always happens during that time, both creatures were quite busy
during the Carnaval season. They were even recruited by the Health ministry to promote the
use of condoms, a product that was distributed for free by the government at a rate of 22
million units—double of what was distributed last year during the same
period—together with 10 million fans, 1.5 million posters, 609 billboards, and 3,500
T-shirts.
The government spent $2.6 million and the material was sent to all state Health
Secretariats and to each of the 3356 municipalities in which at least one case of AIDS was
found. According to a 1999 survey on Brazilian sexual behavior, 54 percent of single
people use a condom for intercourse. This rate falls to 13 percent among those who are
married.
In the commercial prepared for TV—Curitiba's ad agency Master was in charge of the
ad—a little devil encourages a youngster to make it with a brunette girl during a
ball. That's when the angel intervenes reminding the reveler that he doesn't have a
condom. To which the devil retorts: "Ah, you blockhead." From the angel
perspective there is a happy ending with the guy foregoing sex and the ad flashing its
slogan: "It doesn't matter which side you're on. Use a rubber."
The campaign entitled Above Good and Evil was launched by Health minister, José Serra,
who presented the Carnaval crusade as part of a larger effort to fight AIDS. "One of
our biggest challenges," he said, "is to bring awareness to people who think
they are have no risk of getting the disease."
As expected, the Catholic Church—which is against the use of condoms and other
contraceptives in any circumstance—condemned the official campaign against AIDS
alleging that you cannot put an angel and a devil together the way it was done. "This
campaign is harmful," said bishop Raymundo Damasceno, general secretary of CNBB
(Conferência Nacional dos Bispos do Brasil—National Conference of Brazil's Bishops).
"We must not confuse good and evil. Good is good. Evil is evil. And we must always be
on the side of good."
Auxiliary bishop Ladislau Biernaski, from Curitiba, who is known as a liberal Catholic
leader, didn't like the condom ads either. He was more to the point accusing the campaign
of promoting libertinage. Said he, "This effort is completely equivocated inducing
debauchery and promiscuity. The Health Ministry believes that Carnaval is licentiousness,
that there is no Carnaval without sexual relations. This can lead to the destruction of
many families and, mainly, the destruction of youngsters, who start this phase in their
lives thinking that's all there is to Carnaval. To distribute condoms is to spend people's
money in an inappropriate way. Not that we are against the use of condoms, but it has been
proved scientifically that this is not a 100 percent safe method for avoiding HIV."
Renato Cavalhere, Master's vice-president for creation, knew his campaign would be
controversial and would draw the ire of the Church, but decided that the problem was too
serious for him to be worried with religious beliefs. "We cannot preach during
Carnaval," he explained. "This would be throwing money away. We need to speak a
language that everyone understands."
Even more controversial was another spot prepared by Lux Video from São Paulo, which
attacked the Catholic Church directly. "If the Church took centuries to take
responsibility for the Inquisition," the piece asked, "and decades to assume its
responsibility for part of the Nazi crimes, how long will it need to admit that it is
contributing to the spread of AIDS?" This work, however, was vetoed by the Health
Ministry afraid that it would provoke a crisis between the Church and the government.
Brazil has 196,000 cases of AIDS, 146,472 among men and 49,544 among women. The disease
seems to have gone full circle. After its initial impact in the gay community, spreading
later to heterosexuals with many women infected by their husbands, it has come back to
haunt younger homosexual men. These are gays who didn't lose friends to the disease and
who have lowered their guard under the mistaken impression that the new medicine cocktails
will spare them from certain and swift death. In 1998, 38 percent of those infected with
AIDS were heterosexual, in 2000 this number jumped to 42.8 percent. The situation is worse
among women. Between 1994 and 1998 there were nine times more new cases of AIDS among
women than among men.
In the year 2000, 36 percent of the $301 million spent to buy these drugs distributed
among 100,000 patients were used to purchase Efavirenz and Nelfinavir. The financial
burden became so heavy for public health organizations in Brazil that the government
threatened to break the patent of Merck and Roche, the laboratories that manufacture the
medicine. Brazil expects to be able to produce these drugs on its own until the mid of the
year.
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