Join us for a conversation between editors Gabriel Gatti and David Casado-Neira, and authors Pamela Colombo and Jens Andermann, on the new ramifications of the concept of disappearance in global landscapes marked by the precarization of the living, migrations of uprooted communities, and the rapid advance of extractive frontiers in the Global South. How have the debates of the Latin American postdictatorship responded to current challenges to human rights, memory, and justice, and which are the new meanings these circumstances reveal to have always already been latent in the imaginary of disappearance?  

(This is the second dispatch in our series COVID-19 in Latin America: Dispatches from the Southern Frontlines)   Abstract The emerging SARS-CoV-2, a novel human coronavirus, caused the COVID-19 pandemic, with more than 9.5 million cases and 484 000 known fatalities to date (June 24th, 2020). In several regions, healthcare systems have collapsed whereas interventions applied to slow the viral spreading have had major social and economic impacts. After China, Europe, and the United States, Latin America has emerged as the new epicenter of the pandemic. By late-June, the region accounted for roughly 50% of global daily deaths (Gardner, 2020)….

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,…

Image: Aldeia Guarani/Kaiowá, Dourados (Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil). Photo: Maximino Rodrigues   (This is the first dispatch in our series COVID-19 in Latin America: Dispatches from the Southern Frontlines.) Translated by Jens Andermann Dear readers, and everyone interested in this situation, which frightens all people of this earth, the water planet. We live amidst so many diversities that today we get confused even about the kind of people we are, even though we are the first inhabitants of this land called tekoha guasú (the great land). At this difficult time, our Indigenous people here at the village where we…