This thesis utilises an approach of social medicine as a subset of political economy in analysing the AIDS pandemic and obstacles to scaling up access to anti-retroviral HIV/AIDS therapy in the public health care sector of contemporary Mozambique. After a brief introductory chapter in which the epistemological nature of social medicine is clarified, chapter two asks why Mozambique has been--and continues to be--very vulnerable to HIV/AIDS. A historically deconstructing investigation responds by unveiling a number of geopolitical, socioeconomic, and environmental factors that foster and underpin Mozambique’s AIDS crisis. Subsequently, the third chapter traces the entirety of Mozambique’s national response to the pandemic through the past two decades, alongside its epidemiological and regional characteristics. Chapter four introduces the subject of anti-retroviral therapy and portrays the financial, practical, and ethical difficulties that its provision is fraught with in resource constrained settings. Chapter five examines the subject specifically with respect to Mozambique’s national circumstances of dependency upon foreign institutions and actors. Chapter six presents a discussion that suggests that lacking human resources and capacitive weaknesses in public health care sector institutions constitute the most severe obstacles to full-scale provision of anti-retroviral therapy in Mozambique. Chapter seven summarises and concludes in a discussion on the contributions of social medicine to our understanding of the AIDS pandemic and role-out of anti-retrovirals. Moreover, this chapter outlines the implications of the findings of this paper for future policy recommendations. Exemplifications and accounts from other southern African developing countries are included for the sake of comparison and contextualisation