WORKING PAPER NO. 07-05 The Politics of Patents and Drugs in Brazil and Mexico: The Industrial Bases of Health Activism

This paper analyzes the politics of intellectual property (IP) and public health in Brazil and Mexico. Both countries introduced pharmaceutical patents in the 1990s, to comply with their international obligations. Indeed, both countries ’ IP systems were markedly similar in being favorable to the interests of the transnational, innovation-based pharmaceutical sector. Yet since the late 1990s the two countries have diverged in dramatic fashion. In Brazil the response to the high price of drugs and societal demands to reform the IP system has been to make obtaining private ownership over knowledge more difficult and to increase the rights of third parties to access and use knowledge. In Mexico, the response to similar demands has been to raise impediments to third parties’ rights of access and use and effectively extend the periods of protection granted to patent-owners. To explain these differences the paper adopts a political economy approach, analyzing the nature of actors pushing for IP reform and subsequent patterns of alliance formation and political mobilization. In both countries, drug patents, escalating prices