Poverty

This video takes you inside the walls of one of the worst prisons in the Western hemisphere. Overcrowding, poor sanitation, and a general lack of funding in Haiti's National Penitentiary have led to exorbitant HIV and Tuberculosis rates. Reporter Antigone Barton and videographer Stephen Sapienza take a first-hand look at these conditions and an American doctor working to correct them. After this video was taken, USAID authorized $200,000 in emergency funding for health and sanitation improvements.

Aired on Foreign Exchange November 2007.

These are good times in this embattled capital.

Kidnappings are down and trash is picked up.

Brightly-painted trucks that serve as buses drive through bustling streets where vendors supply cheap wares and workers repair ancient machines with obsolete tools.

United Nations trucks patrol the streets, too, but after years of outside intervention, the people of this impoverished republic are running their own government.

With HIV widespread in prisons, Dr. John May travels back and forth from the U.S. to treat infected inmates in Haiti.

CANGE, Haiti — Trucks teeter perilously as they climb the rutted and rock-strewn road between Port-au- Prince and Cange, jolting the people who travel unsheltered on their cargo.

Under the best conditions, it is a three-hour journey of lurching, halting and downpours.

It was an especially hard trek for a frail and feverish 35-year-old woman named Benita, who was put atop a truck one day in August after seven months of growing weaker while the pain in her belly grew stronger.

Experts at the International AIDS Society Conference discuss the future of treating and preventing the HIV virus.

Sex workers in the Dominican Republic fight against the growing rate of HIV and AIDS among them through vaccine trials and sex education.

Aired on Foreign Exchange the week of November 16, 2007.

Watch the video on the Heroes of HIV interactive website.

No story on the Naxalite conflict would be complete without meeting the insurgents themselves. From Delhi to Dantewada I'd been alternately told they were: a) champions of the powerless, ready to talk b) scheming profiteers who would take me hostage for ransom if given the chance c) thugs sure to slit my throat.

Dantewada lies at the axis of three roads. Today each of these roads are lined with government-run refugee camps, home to at least 50,000 villagers -- mostly tribals -- that have been relocated since Salwa Judum began. Far from a sign of state control, the camps exist because authorities have defaulted control of vast swathes of the backcountry where Naxalites roam.

Of the 22 official camps throughout the south Bastar region, Dornapal is by far the largest. Row upon row of mud and sheet metal barracks shelter more than 17,000 people, though there are surely many more.

SOUTH BASTAR — Two years ago, Comrade Sunil used his given name and spent half the day at school, the remainder working the red fields of his ancestral village.

This all changed one night when he found his home torched and his brother dead outside, allegedly shot by state-sponsored civilian militia on the pretext of being a Maoist sympathiser.

Paraguay has been run by one political party for the past half century. But former Catholic bishop Fernando Lugo is hoping to challenge that. Reporter Charles Lane has the story.

Click on the image to view more photographs of the Naxalites, police and militia, and the tribal villagers in the region.