HARARE, Zimbabwe — When police arrested Monica Nzou for selling fruit on a slum corner, they taunted her about her AIDS.
Nzou, 34, a shy, painfully thin street peddler who is one of 700,000 Zimbabweans uprooted by a government crackdown on informal settlements, begged to be released. She had two young daughters to take care of, she told the officers. She was HIV-positive, a widow -- her husband had already died of AIDS.
"They laughed and said they were going to charge me with murder for infecting my husband," she recalled softly. "Then they took away my shoes. They told me to walk barefoot back to the countryside. They said, 'Go away and die.' "
That is the fate that confronts not just Nzou, but millions of other HIV-positive Zimbabweans, a once-prosperous African state sinking ever deeper into mass hunger, economic ruin and authoritarian rule.
Haunted by one of the world's highest rates of HIV/AIDS, Zimbabwe would be facing a daunting public health challenge even in the best of times. More than a quarter of its 12.7 million citizens are infected with the deadly virus, U.N. statistics show. As many as 3,000 new cases surface in the country every week.
Yet today, surging inflation, a lack of foreign currency to buy imported medicines, and President Robert Mugabe's ruthless slum-clearing campaign all mean that fewer Zimbabweans than ever have access to crucial antiretroviral drugs that are prolonging life elsewhere.
In the last three months, the U.N. reports, hyperinflation has jacked up the cost of a monthly cocktail of generic HIV drugs from $7.70 to $17 or more -- a fatal increase in a country where the average laborer earns the equivalent of $20 a month.
Just getting enough food to eat has become a struggle for untold thousands of Zimbabweans weakened by HIV or AIDS. The nation's farming output has been slashed by drought and a disastrous land-reform policy. And in the cities, the poorest HIV/AIDS victims have stopped taking their medicines because of Operation Murambatsvina, or "clean out the filth," Mugabe's massive urban renewal program.
Over the last four months, bulldozers have leveled entire shantytowns in Zimbabwe. Human-rights groups accuse Mugabe of trying to drive the restless urban poor back to the countryside, where his ruling party, Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front, maintains a tighter political grip. Distribution of food by aid groups has been restricted in the cities to keep displaced slum dwellers from returning.
