skip navigation

Not in the United States?
change your preferences.

Macho Love

Sex Behind Bars in Central America

• By Phd, John Dececco

• Price: $17.95
• Binding: Paperback (also available in Hardback)
• Pages: 132
• Published by: Routledge
• Publication Date: 25th August 1999
• ISBN: 978-1-56023-966-6

About the Book

Macho Love: Sex Behind Bars in Central America is the first in-depth study of sexual culture and AIDS in Latin prisons. Psychologists, social workers, criminologists, and AIDS specialists will discover how the interplay of sexual ideals, prostitution, manipulation, resistance, and power relationships among prisoners and some staff are based on money, sex, drugs, and violence. Macho Love gives you a stirring and emotional look at the various risks and dangers lurking in the Latin American prison culture and discusses how Costa Rican and Central American prisons are improving the situation with new intervention programs.

Fascinating and informative, Macho Love explores the dangerous Latin prison culture as it discusses:

• new HIV/AIDS prevention programs implemented in some Costa Rican and Central American prisons
• the frequency and types of prostitution and rape in prison
• drug and alcohol addiction and their effects on the spread of HIV/AIDS
• an understanding of why rehabilitation programs fail or succeed
• the lack of opportunities to work or to study that leaves the inmates vulnerable to the only freedom they have left--sex
• why a “cachero,” or a man who penetrates another man, is not considered a homosexual and often refuses to wear a condom, which tremendously increases the risk of HIV/AIDS
  
  Macho Love explores the life-threatening sexual culture in prisons to bring you the realities of the Latin prison culture. This revealing book examines the different types of relationships which occur in prisons and the factors that place inmates at risk for contracting the HIV virus, such as not wearing a condom because of intoxication due to drugs and alcohol. Macho Love also shows you how the new HIV/AIDS intervention programs in Costa Rica are combatting these serious problems to lower HIV infection rates and avoid the spread of this deadly and dangerous disease.

Table of Contents

Contents Preface

• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Background: The Study and the Prisons
• Information Sources
• Admission
• First Impact
• The Scale of the Homosexual Phenomenon
• Two Views of Homosexuality
• Chapter 2: The Cachero and the Transvestite
• Initiation
• Sexual Practices
• Cachero Love
• Chapter 3: The Cachero and the “Kid”
• Initiation
• The Güila’s Story 8 Changes in Sexual Practices
• Chapter 4: Foxes
• The Revolutionary Backside
• Power and Sex
• Chapter 5: Relationships of Power and Money
• Prostitution Among Foxes
• Rape
• Chapter 6: Risk Factors in Sexual Relationships
• Alcoholism and Drug Addiction
• Condom Use and Attitudes Toward Condoms
• Intimacy
• Chapter 7: Suggestions for Prevention
• Drawbacks 8 The Holistic Model
• Sexual Education
• Accepting the Lesser Evil
• Recognition of Homosexual Couples
• Assistance in Detoxification
• Prevention of Violence
• Playing with Free Time
• Microenterprises
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index