De sentenças de morte a sentenças de vida: estratégias jurídico-políticas e a educação popular no combate às violações de direitos humanos das pessoas que vivem com HIV

Abstract

The first AIDS cases appeared in Brazil in the mid-1980s in a political context marked by resistance from left-wing groups and social movements fighting for the defense and guarantee of social rights. In Paraiba, the NGO Center for Guidance and Development of Struggle for Life (CORDEL VIDA) has activities that go beyond 15 years of activities to fight and defend the human rights of people living with HIV and other Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs), showing thus, as an important space for research, resistance and construction of re-existences. Based on systematic violations of rights and the need to reframe the traditional conceptualization of human rights, popular legal advisors emerge carrying out work that, in addition to legal assistance, also builds a political and educational process, in which, in particular, the role of popular education and human rights education based on resistance to the frequent human rights violations suffered by subaltern groups and, in this case, violations suffered by people living with HIV. The present investigation aimed, therefore, to develop a process of identification and analysis around the strategies adopted by CORDEL VIDA in legal political actions to defend the human rights of people living with HIV, inspired by the principles of popular education, carried out by the advisory popular legal issues in health, seeking to take them as knowledge of experience made in popular education and their respective impacts on the realization of human rights of these people in João Pessoa. It is a research with a qualitative approach, being also: i) bibliographic, in order to analyze and know the existing theoretical contributions in the investigation field; ii) documentary, from the access to reports of executed projects, photos, and other documentation that allow the identification of adopted strategies; and iii) in the field, based on semi-structured interviews, in order to investigate the impacts arising from the legal-political strategies adopted by the popular legal advice on health of the NGO CORDEL VIDA. The investigation process enabled important results not only to the academic environment, but also to CORDEL VIDA itself, providing the study and improvement of the effectiveness of the strategies adopted until then. Finally, it was possible to observe the political and legal importance of CORDEL VIDA from the execution of its projects on the most diverse fronts of action, whether in schools, on the streets, in legal services or in the workshops/courses held. On all these fronts, the presence of popular education was clear and formidable, not as a methodology, but as a principle of its action in the process of building knowledge from a horizontal relationship between educators and students; in legal assistance services based on the application of the principles of popular legal education; in encouraging and promoting advocacy and political advocacy in defense of human rights; and in the empowerment of the people who participate in its activities that allow them to become protagonists in the defense of their rights.