Pasión por la Vida Campaign - Passion for Life Campaign

The Regional Awareness Campaign Pasión por la Vida consists of high-quality television announcements (PSAs or public service announcements), and other central components of programming, whose message will support some key issues related to the epidemic in Latin America: stigma and discrimination; voluntary counselling and testing (VCT); availability of support services; prevention; prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT); and knowledge about treatment, among others.

The intended audiences for the campaign are the general Spanish-speaking and Portuguese-speaking populations between 18-50 years of age in Latin America paying special attention to young people, parents with children under the age of 25, pregnant women, immigrant workers, and the male homosexual community. The campaign has its own regional webpage that it uses to centralise all information about HIV/AIDS and local contact information for testing, treatment, and support. The page also includes ways for people to join the campaign against discrimination by expressing their own "Passion."

"Pasión por la Vida" has documentary-style testimonies for 13 people who live with HIV in Latin America. Their stories transmit a sense of struggle, the difficulties, overcoming them, hope, and, above all else, love and passion for life. The objective is to knock myths over, abolish fear, and end stigmatisation and discrimination that still encircle HIV/AIDS.

At the same time, the campaign has a regional- and national-level training component. The trainings are provided by professional media personnel and serve to improve the quality and the quantity of television and radio programming, news programming, and the way public issues about AIDS are treated.

HIV/AIDS, Youth

"Pasión por la Vida" is part of the Iniciativa de Medios Latinoamericanas sobre el SIDA (IMLAS - Latin American Media Initiative on AIDS) and was constituted during the Iniciativa Global de Medios sobre SIDA (GMAI - Global Media Initiative on AIDS) - an effort that has support from the United Nations (UN) and was launched in 2005 by the Kaiser Family Foundation together with the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) to mobilise the press throughout the world regarding the pandemic. This alliance promotes the collaboration and resource sharing between media outlets in the region in order to increase knowledge about HIV and reduce stigma.