Latin America is becoming the new epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic. The arrival of the coronavirus in the region’s slums threatens to exacerbate pre-existing political, economic and social problems. With nuances specific to each country, the health crisis could soon create a reality as unstable as it is explosive, Buenos Aires-based Pablo Stefanoni writes in the original published in Le Monde Diplomatique.
Is South America heading towards a “new normal” or is the COVID-19 pandemic just a tragic parenthesis in “business as usual?” Will there be major socio-political impacts or only short-term political consequences? It is too early to tell, but a look at the region shows that the fight against the pandemic is beset by the same old problems and the same old difficulties: decaying and highly unequal health systems from country to country, very high labor informality, overcrowding, insufficient government resources, a lack of response at the regional level and growing international irrelevance. According to World Health Organization (WHO) officials, Latin America is becoming a new epicenter of the pandemic.
In response to COVID-19, governments decided to implement containment—with different doses of militarization and social assistance—including, in some cases, temporary basic guaranteed income, business and corporate relief, and improvised efforts to bring hospitals, nursing homes and prisons up to up to date.
Unlike Europe, it could be said that the South American dilemma is not strictly between health and economy, but rather between health and social explosion. An even worse scenario than the already ominous one that preceded the pandemic is looming: the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) is forecasting a 5.3 percent contraction in regional gross domestic product (GDP) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is talking about a new “lost decade”. Adding to this, as a direct consequence, has been a sharp increase in unemployment and inequality.1 To complicate the picture, most of the region’s presidents are far from having solid bases of support to help them face new cycles of political instability. At least for now, the pandemic has squelched, or at least, postponed, struggles in places like Chile, Bolivia and Colombia.
The peripheries of large cities are potentially explosive territories. In these dense working-class areas, the slogan of “stay at home” clashes with everyday realities. This is not only because extended families live in overcrowded conditions and need to earn an income, but also because many of the basic things that the middle classes do at home, such as eating or getting water, often have to be done in common spaces due to poverty. That is why, in the case of the slums and shantytowns of Argentina, “stay at home” turned into “stay in the neighborhood” as a form of improvised community quarantine took root while authorities tried to increase emergency testing. “Social isolation in the favelas is untenable, both from the point of view of housing and from the point of view of the ways of life that, unlike the middle and upper classes, are accustomed to expanding the house beyond its walls,” said the Federação de Órgãos para Assistência Social e Educacional, a Brazilian NGO.2 One of the problems of the Latin American quarantines was precisely their lack of accommodation to these realities.
With about half of the region’s workers in the informal sector, quarantines de facto became flexible. Nearly 89 percent of traders tested positive in the Wholesale Fruit Market in Lima. In Bolivia and Chile there were protests in working-class areas and, in Ecuador, the protesters threatened a “new October”, referring to the violent protests in 2019 against fuel price hikes. Many anticipate a “tragedy” if the virus reaches the hills of the city of Valparaíso, Chile, one of the new hot spots for COVID-19.
“When the coronavirus pandemic enters the working-class districts of large Latin American cities, it will be entering for the first time an unknown world of deep poverty, chronic hunger, substandard housing without water and structural unemployment, in sectors already affected by dengue fever and tuberculosis,” wrote Uruguayan journalist Raúl Zibechi. As I write these words, the virus has already hit. For now, we do not know the scale of the spread or what results public policies will have. And as we saw in the Argentine case, this set off alarm bells in the offices of the political decision-makers.
Consumption wasn’t enough
Although it is attractive to think of the current crisis as reflecting a progressive/neoliberal split, the reality, as is often the case, “is a little more complicated”. Undoubtedly, there were significant reductions in poverty during the time of Latin America’s “pink tide” governments’ “turn to the left” —especially in the first five years of the 2000s, due to increases in the minimum wage and direct income transfers. But these initiatives not only coincided with the commodities boom, but they often didn’t produce an improvement in government capacity nor improve social protection systems. In the case of Venezuela, the health system sank into a deep crisis, in the context of the broader decline of the Bolivarian economic and social model.3 In Bolivia, where macroeconomic management was at the opposite pole from that in Venezuela, and there was even talk of an “economic miracle”, with an average GDP growth of 5 percent annually. But health care was one of the major unresolved issues of Evo Morales’ government. It was only at the end of Morales’ term—which ended abruptly in the midst of a political crisis and a de facto military coup—that the Bolivian president tried to respond to social pressure with a haphazard health care reform.
Brazil, another example of large-scale “social inclusion” under the Workers’ Party (PT) governments, also shows the limits of its approach in reforming the welfare state. Social welfare expert Lena Lavinas summarized it as follows: “In the case of Brazil, social policy served to consolidate the social-developmentalist consumption model, which consisted of promoting the transition to a mass consumer society through access to credit in the financial services industry. The innovation of the social-developmental model is that it has infused the logic of financialization throughout the entire social welfare system, either through access to the credit market, or via the expansion of private health plans, student loans, etc. These were years of promoting an aggressive financial inclusion strategy.”4 Meanwhile, the public health system, which had been underfunded for decades, fell into collapse.
In almost all cases, the progressive cycle encouraged a more democratic model of access to consumption rather than the construction of solid systems of social security and quality public goods (in areas such as transport, health or housing). Many of these deficits are now becoming more acute in “post-populist” contexts in which reactionary governments that want to roll back social progress have come to power in countries such as Brazil and Bolivia. They were also expressed, in a more muted way, in the interregnum of Mauricio Macri in Argentina.
Today we are witnessing a “lurch to socialism” all over the world, a product of “government nervousness”, in ironic words of John Keane.5 This has caused most governments of whatever political stripe to relax fiscal orthodoxy to “put money” in the pockets of companies and individuals. If the moderate progressive Argentinean President Alberto Fernandez decided on a one-time payment of 10,000 pesos to informal workers and single-income earners, his far-right Brazilian counterpart Jair Bolsonaro approved a three-month basic income of 600 reais (just over U.S. $100) for informal sector workers. “This will give them the resources to face the first wave of the impact, that of health, during the next three months. There is another wave that threatens us and will come from economic dislocation,” said Economy Minister Paulo Guedes, a “Chicago Boy” who worked with Augusto Pinochet’s advisors in the 1970s in Chile. Today, under pressure from the pandemic and the military, Guedes is more flexible in turning on the tap. Peru allocated between 9 percent and 12 percent of its GDP to help people who lost their jobs (or self-employment) and to support companies that were left without income because of the emergency. This did not prevent the country from amassing more than 4,000 dead, with the virus from spreading dangerously.6
What about politics?
One of the impacts of the pandemic was political: getting protestors off the streets, postponing scheduled elections and, depending on the country, de-escalating or escalating political conflict. In the case of Chile, the COVID-19 pandemic gave Sebastian Piñera breathing space after facing a social upheaval that he couldn’t wind down. One of gains of the uprising was the government’s pledge to set a date for a constitutional referendum to replace the Magna Carta of the Pinochet dictatorship. If, at first, Chile appeared as a success that legitimized “strategic” and “flexible” government quarantines and military occupation of the streets, the worsening of the situation led Piñera to backtrack and to decree a tougher quarantine. In this way, we could see the limits of a strategy that sought to combat the coronavirus with testing, but without Argentine-style quarantines. Those who had been praising the “flexible” Chilean policy quickly moved on to praise Uruguay’s approach.
Bolivia, too, saw a “freeze” in a situation that was moving at a frenetic political pace after the overthrow of Evo Morales last November. President Jeanine Áñez is facing an erosion of her image due to her management of the pandemic, which is hitting the eastern part of the country, where she is herself from, to a greater extent. A case of price gouging for respirators led to the resignation and arrest of Health Minister Marcelo Navajas in record time and put a government that wasn’t elected on the line. Starting with a hard base of 30 percent of the electorate, the former economy minister of Evo Morales’ government, Luis Arce Catacora, is seeking to capitalize on discontent as the government discusses setting a time for new elections. Without a political or social climate supporting a call for the return of former president Morales (currently exiled in Buenos Aires), the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) will try to run on its economic record during better times while overcoming the perception that its political project had been exhausted after a decade and a half before last November’s crisis.
Meanwhile, Brazil largely accounts for the discouraging regional climate: once a driving force behind South American integration, today it is a bull in a china shop, governed by a climate- and science-denying president who puts the very existence of the republic at risk. Jair Bolsonaro is navigating three overlapping crises: political, economic and health. Political and judicial conspiracies following the departure from the cabinet of the star minister Sérgio Moro, a fall in the GDP estimated at around 5 percent7, and 400,000 coronavirus infections and 25,000 deaths stain an administration that, as André Singer pointed out, is based on “permanent radicalization”. With the support of about one-third of the population, Bolsonaro runs a government permanently stoking the “culture war”. The politicization of the fight against the pandemic led him to quip, between guffaws, that “the right wing takes chloroquine and the left takes Tubaine,” comparing the Trump-promoted anti-malarial drug to a popular soft drink from Sao Paulo. (In Portuguese, the “chloroquine” and “Tubaine” rhyme.) Not far below the surface, one can observe a growing military influence and a possible authoritarian drift in a government that is the closest thing to the “alt right” in Latin America.
The case of Venezuela is, as always, unique. Possibly owing to its previous international isolation, the country is still hasn’t been hit severely by COVID-19. Its “new normal” combines gasoline shortages—the direction of smuggling has been reversed: now it is from Colombia to Venezuela—a de facto dollarization of the economy and new opposition adventures, such as the May 3-4 shambolic operation carried out by a Miami-based company with defectors from the Bolivarian Armed Forces. This opposition flailing could further erode the leadership of Juan Guaidó, the self-styled “acting president.”8
In a scenario of fragmentation and uncertainty, South America lacks leaders with regional aspirations as well as political visions for the future. In a world that, in one way or another, will contend with ways of adapting to the post-pandemic context, the exhaustion of the “turn to the left” and the failure of the neoliberal or “alt” rights, will possibly make the South American “new normal” a series of one-off and improvised responses to a mounting series of crises, with renewed risks of social and political instability, and “firefighter presidents” who will try to put out the fires. Much will depend on the course the global “great plague” takes in our region, which, as we are seeing, depends on a multiplicity of variables and a little bit of luck.
Translated by Lance Selfa
1 “Alicia Bárcena: ‘Si no se toman medidas, la pobreza aumentaría en forma dramática en la región’”, DW, 22-5-20.
2 “La Covid-19 y la injusticia de la vida en las favelas y periferias urbanas de Río de Janeiro”, OpenDemocracy.net, 24-4-20.
3 Stefania Gozzer, “Cómo la crisis de salud en Venezuela se puede convertir en un problema para los países de la región, BBC, 26-2-19.
4 Pablo Stefanoni, “Brasil: pandemia, guerra cultural y precariedad”, entrevista a Lena Lavinas, Nueva Sociedad, Nº 287, Buenos Aires, mayo-junio de 2020.
5 John Keane, “La democracia y la gran pestilencia”, Letras Libres, México-Madrid, 1-5-20.
6 Cecilia Barría, “Coronavirus: los 10 países que más han gastado en enfrentar la pandemia (y cómo se ubican los de América Latina)”, BBC, 18-5-20.
7 Cecilia Filas, “Por el coronavirus, Brasil estima que el PBI podría sufrir la peor caída en 120 años”, El Cronista, Buenos Aires, 13-5-20.
8 Manuel Sutherland, “¿Cómo fue la parodia venezolana de Bahía de los Cochinos?”, Nueva Sociedad, edición web, mayo de 2020, Nuso.org.
Lance Selfa
Lance Selfa is the author of The Democrats: A Critical History (Haymarket, 2012) and editor of U.S. Politics in an Age of Uncertainty: Essays on a New Reality (Haymarket, 2017).
