The doctor told him: ”If you want to live, you have to leave Venezuela.» It was December 2017. That day, Alfonzo felt that his diagnosis of HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) not only drove him to death at the age of 37 but also banished him from his country. «I was left blank (…) I thought about my partner, the possibility of having infected him. I went over my story. The names of my previous relationships. I was so scared”, Alfonzo remembered.
The shortage of antiretrovirals in Venezuela reaches 90%. For AIDS virus carriers, staying means death. To emigrate, to have access to treatment to continue living. In Peru, there are 1,179 Venezuelans with HIV registered by the Ministry of Health. But NGOs estimate that it can be up to 8,000.
On Saturday, February 24, 2017, Alfonso arrived in Lima dehydrated, with swollen feet and just enough money for a month of lodging and food. He needed to get to work. But his priority was his treatment. Monday he knocked on the door of the NGO SIDAVida, who took him to a hospital. The next day, he managed to get the CD4 count, which revealed that he was in the AIDS stage by having a count of 150 white blood cells when the normal is 1.000. He was followed by consultations and received treatment a month later.
The doctors report that the migrants in this condition arrive in Peru with pathologies that weren’t seen from 30 years ago.
