Human Rights Watch

Denied Medication, AIDS Patient Dies in Custody;

Victor Arellano's Fellow Detainees Staged a Protest Over His Treatment

By Sandra Hernandez

Daily Journal Staff Writer

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 9, 2007 - The handful of prescription drugs Victor Arellano took each morning kept him alive.

But Arellano, in the throes of full-blown AIDS, was denied that medicine when immigration officials locked him up at the San Pedro detention center, other detainees said.

Two months later Arellano, 23, died in custody - too weak to walk to the bathroom alone, but shackled to a hospital bed.

Arellano's family and his fellow detainees said the detention center's staff denied him his critical medication despite repeated requests.

"He called me two weeks before he died and told me he was afraid," said Arellano's mother, Olga. "He kept telling me how frustrated he felt because he wanted to see a doctor. He asked for his medicine but no one listened to him."

Victor came to the United States from Mexico as a child. A transgender person, he was known as Victoria Arellano to his fellow detainees, who routinely referred to him as her.

"She was so sick that if you tried to move her she would scream," said Walter Ayala, another detainee, recalling her final two weeks.

Arellano spent most days in a bunk bed, complaining of debilitating headaches, back pain, nausea and stomach cramps, Ayala said.

New America Media, Q&A, Roberto Lovato, Posted: Dec 09, 2006

Editor's Note: New America Media caught up with Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, during an event in honor of International Human Rights Day, which is Sunday. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan spoke at the event. Roberto Lovato is a New America Media writer based in New York.

NAM: What will HRW's priorities be this coming year?

Kenneth Roth: Most urgently, we want to stop large-scale killing in places like Darfur and Eastern Congo. We want to stop the retrenchment in human rights in places like Russia and we want to push for a more responsible global role for countries like China. At the same time, we want to open up some of the closed societies in the Middle East. It's also critical that we fight the entrenched repression in places like Burma and North Korea. And we need to change the attitude toward fighting terrorism, so that it is inherently one that is based on a fundamental respect for human rights.

NAM: What are your concerns about human rights in the United States?

Unfortunately, U.S. credibility on human rights in the world has been shot by the way the U.S. has chosen to fight its so-called "war on terrorism." Kofi Annan stressed today that you can't effectively curb terrorism if you are violating human rights; you can't use secret detention facilities or torture to promote human rights. That's a message that is clearly directed at Washington.