DOSSIER: COVID-19 in Latin America: Dispatches from the Southern Frontlines
DOSSIER: COVID-19 in Latin America: Dispatches from the Southern Frontlines
Introduction
The outbreak of coronavirus with early epicenters in Eastern Asia, Europe, and the United States, has been followed more recently by increasingly alarming health emergencies across the Global South, with India, Southern and Central Africa reporting exponential surges of deaths and infections in May and June. But it is in Latin America where the pandemic is now threatening to explode into dimensions unseen even at the previous epicenters’ peak points, with Brazil now reporting the highest daily numbers of infections and deaths worldwide and other countries including Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, and Mexico facing an all-out sanitary disaster. Throughout the region, COVID-19 has hit communities with precarious access to healthcare and elementary services the hardest, including inhabitants of informal urbanizations as well as Indigenous, Afro-descendent, and peasant communities. The pandemic and its aftereffects have also disproportionately affected women and children, in addition to the elderly. The impact of Coronavirus in the region is of course not limited to a health catastrophe alone: forced lockdowns with little or no social mitigation measures have exposed large swaths of the population to poverty and even hunger, sexual and racial violence is on the rise in many countries, and in some places paramilitary forces associated with agrobusiness and extractive industries have seized the moment for carrying out large-scale grabs of Indigenous and peasant lands, often with the open complicity of local and state governments. Yet despite the planetary dimension of the pandemic, journalistic as well as critical debates have frequently remained limited to national (or at best regional) responses, with voices from the frontlines of the Global South largely absent from the conversation. Over the following months, the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies blog will therefore publish a series of dispatches — short chronicles and opinion pieces — from different Latin American countries as well as Latinx communities in the Global North. Contributions will be published free to access both in the original Spanish and Portuguese and in English translation, and a selection will also be included in forthcoming print and online issues of the Journal.
First post in the series: ARA RY´APÚ TEKO-ASY (Tempos de pandemia) by Maximino Rodrigues — GUARANI-NHANDEWÁ KATUPYRY. Available in English here.
