New barriers to drugs could worsen Guatemala's long-ignored AIDS problem

Posted on Thu, Jan. 05, 2006
New barriers to drugs could worsen Guatemala's long-ignored AIDS problem
BY ERNESTO LONDONO
The Dallas Morning News
GUATEMALA CITY-

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The country - which critics say has been inexcusably slow to acknowledge its AIDS problem - recently received an $8.4 million grant from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, a Geneva-based coalition of private and public organizations. The funds are earmarked mostly to provide lifesaving medicine to Guatemalans with HIV.

But Guatemala has concurrently signed a free-trade agreement with the United States that includes provisions U.N. officials and Guatemalan physicians fear could significantly hinder the widespread distribution of affordable, generic AIDS drugs to people who need them.

Experts say erecting new barriers between Guatemalans with HIV and anti-retroviral medicines could prove especially costly now that the country's epidemic appears to be becoming generalized in some regions, meaning it is not confined to easily identifiable segments of the population.

"The epidemic began in Africa many years before it did in America," said Dr. Eduardo Arathoon, who runs one of the few AIDS clinics in the country. "The only difference between Africa and us is time."
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http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/world/13555517.htm
(Free registration required)

Guatemalan President and _{George W. Bush}

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Earliest known Mayan writing found in Guatemala
Reuters

Jan 5, 2006 — By Mica Rosenberg

ANTIGUA, Guatemala (Reuters) - Archeologists excavating a pyramid complex in the Guatemalan jungle have uncovered the earliest example of Mayan writing ever found, 10 bold hieroglyphs painted on plaster and stone.

The 2,300-year-old glyphs were excavated last April in San Bartolo and suggest the ancient Mayas developed an advanced writing system centuries earlier than previously believed, according to an article published on Thursday in the journal Science.

The glyphs date from between 200 BC and 300 BC and come from the same site in the Peten jungle of northern Guatemala where archeologist William Saturno found the oldest murals in the Mayan world in 2001. Radiocarbon tests prove the writing is 100 years older than the murals depicting the Mayan creation myth.

The glyphs, thin black paintings on off-white stucco, lay in a plastic tub in a laboratory in an old house in the colonial city of Antigua on Thursday as archeologists cleaned and cataloged other stones from the San Bartolo site.
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http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=1474641

We would know so much more about their writing if the Spanish HAD NOT DESTROYED their records and artifacts when they seized their land.