Adding Insult to Injury: The COVID-19 Crisis Strikes Latin America

Abstract

This article takes on the task of historicizing the global crisis that unfolded after the outbreak of COVID-19, focusing on its particular dynamics in Latin America. It proposes a distinction between a first phase — an unmitigated crisis that lasted until the end of 2020 — and a second phase in the period since then, that is defined by managed crisis and lukewarm economic recovery. The first phase showed a profoundly fragmented local state response, the breakdown of capital's ‘normal’ capacity for reproduction, and a disarticulation of the world order. As of 2021, a different kind of crisis has been evident: the response has been more emphatic and more effective in re-establishing accumulation and a weak and fragile international order, but at a cost to legitimacy whose full extent is yet to unfold.