Tijuana AIDS Victim Strives to Help Others : Illness: The poverty-stricken 19-year-old is among sufferers in the border city who must deal with indifference, intolerance and inadequate treatment and medical facilities.

By SEBASTIAN ROTELLA

Dec. 23, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

TIJUANA — The face of AIDS here is a gaunt 19-year-old in a Raiders cap named Luis. His 16-year-old wife holds his hand as he describes how her mother threw the couple out of the house when she learned they were infected.

“Even your own family rejects you,” Luis said during an interview at a free AIDS clinic, his eyes stark, his speech fervent and slurred. “Sooner or later, people are going to have to learn that it’s a sickness like any other.”

The couple live on the money Olga earns as a scavenger at the municipal garbage dump. Luis has occasionally found shelter at Emilio’s, a cafe and center of gay activism. He and Olga get regular treatment and counseling at the 2-year-old free clinic on Avenida Constitucion run by U.S. and Mexican medical volunteers and gay activists, the only such facility in the city.

Gay leaders in Tijuana have found themselves on the front lines in helping people like Luis and Olga as the overburdened social service and medical agencies find themselves unable to cope with even the basic needs of the general population.

“When you realize that several thousand babies die every year of treatable diarrhea, what makes you think that people will spend money on treating AIDS?” said Mary McCarthy, an American nurse who helped start the clinic in a Mexican federal health center.

Federal health officials say there are 174 reported AIDS cases in Tijuana, a city of more than 1 million. Experts believe the actual figure could be five times higher. Despite a newly formed government task force on AIDS prevention, not only prevention but even reporting and treatment are hampered by the lack of resources and continuing fear and ignorance, said Dr. Jose Luis Lepe, the clinic director. Even some health workers heartily believe the myths about how AIDS is spread.

“They don’t want to admit AIDS patients in hospitals,” he said. “They don’t want to operate on them. There is rejection and discrimination.”

The stories of rejection are heard from patients, doctors, city officials: the dying male prostitute whose friends wrapped him in blankets and dumped him on a sidewalk, where Red Cross workers did not want to touch him; the 28-year-old who died recently in the city bus station after wandering from Los Angeles to southern Mexico to the border in search of relatives who would take him in; the nurses who don’t want to go near infected patients; the mortuaries that refuse to bury the dead.

The clinic was briefly shut down in 1989 by a new federal health administrator who reportedly said it would somehow spread the disease, but his supervisors ordered it reopened and dismissed the official after an outcry. Activists say their next goal is to open a hospice.

Meanwhile, Luis and Olga have found shelter with her father in the ramshackle neighborhood of scavengers, or pepenadores , that has long existed at the dump. Olga was pregnant when she became infected. The baby died after two months.

The couple still talk of gathering up scrap to build their own shack near the dump one day. Luis tries to make money washing car windows downtown, but he tires easily. He proudly displays a card identifying him as a volunteer counselor in a national AIDS education program.

“I am trying to educate everyone I can,” he said. “I am telling everyone I can to be careful, to use protection. When I went back to my hometown in Sinaloa, I was teaching doctors there everything I knew.”