Catholics turn to condoms in AIDS-ravaged Honduras

With his mother long dead and his father off with a new family, nobody comes to visit Carlos, 27, as he sits blinded by AIDS and awaiting death in a charity hospice.

His father, who left him alone to care for his grandmother until she died, won't let him near his home, mistakenly believing he will infect his family by sharing their toilet, Carlos explains, the hurt spilling out of his sightless eyes.

Typical of the kind of Honduran now catching the virus, the boyish-faced former factory worker is neither sexually promiscuous nor an intravenous drug user. He caught HIV from a steady girlfriend who got it from a former lover.

Faced with one of the fastest-growing AIDS epidemics in the Western Hemisphere, church volunteers in this desperately poor Catholic nation are turning their backs on the Vatican's anti-condom stance, which is being upheld by new conservative Pope Benedict.

"It's a minor sin," says Wendy Guerra, head of "Program Open Door" in the sweaty city of San Pedro Sula. Hers is one of an army of Catholic-run AIDS prevention programs in tiny Honduras, home to some 60 percent of Central America's AIDS cases.

"As a Catholic charity we can't hand out condoms but we give advice about them and make sure people know where to get them," said Catherine O'Leary, a British nurse who runs the San Jose Hospice which took in Carlos when an AIDS-related disease blinded him.

A bustling industrial city that sprung up with the banana industry a century ago, San Pedro Sula crawls with prostitutes after dusk, thanks to a handful of nearby ports, and has so many HIV carriers it is dubbed Central America's AIDS capital.

With its chronic poverty, sprawling sex industry, violent crime gangs and macho culture, Honduras has been an easy breeding ground for the virus. Some 70,000 Hondurans are living with HIV/AIDS, nearly 2 percent of the adult population.

Among gay men and sex workers, the HIV rate is 10 percent.

Aid groups say that with the virus now spreading fast among the general public, which is less informed about the risks than sex workers, education on AIDS prevention is urgent.

"The thing is to try and save lives, which is just as important as focusing on unborn lives," said Guerra, explaining why she quietly advises HIV carriers to use condoms.

HOUSEWIVES VULNERABLE

According to the United Nations, more than half of new HIV infections everywhere are in the 15-26 age range, with women most hit. In Honduras, where a married man without lovers is an oddity, 90 percent of newly infected women are housewives.

The widespread poverty in Honduras means few have access to healthcare and there is no social network for AIDS sufferers.