On the opening day of the International AIDS conference, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said that discrimination against gay people must be brought to an end and required countries to enlarge AIDS-prevention programmes for the this group.

Likewise, Mexican President Felipe Calderon, ex-president of Botswana, Festus Mogae, and St Kitts and Nevis President Denzil Douglas each required people to no more discriminate individuals who do not have straight orientation.

Starting 1980s, since the pandemic began, this is the first AIDS conference in Latin America of this type. An estimated 25,000 scientists, physicians, politicians, such as Bill Clinton, and activists were expected to attend it. The event opened yesterday and is scheduled to end Friday.

In 2004 general election, Mogae promised to engage in fighting against the spread of HIV-Aids, which he vowed to stop in Botswana by 2016. He was one of the first African presidents to publicly take an HIV test in order to instigate citizens to do the same way.

Thousands of people worldwide marched through the streets of the Mexican capital, holding banners that had slogans due to encourage people to fight against homophobia. Some demonstrators were dressed in garish rainbow colors, this way showing their support towards gays, who represent one-fourth of the new cases of infections in Latin America.

'It is difficult to evaluate the extent of homophobia in our country,' said Jorge Saavedra Lopez, director of Mexico's National Centre for Prevention and Control of HIV/AIDS and Mexico’s first openly gay person to work as a senior government official