The Country’s problem is not the coronavirus

The chapter argues that the idea of the centrality of the pandemic in social and political life over the last few years – of the pandemic as a “total social fact” (Mauss) – did not hold for all political communities. If in the United States of America, the pandemic was perhaps overdetermining political life, in the case of Bolivia, the COVID-19 emergency was relegated to almost secondary status in the context of chronic political, economic and environmental crises. Decades of political crisis and neoliberal state restructuring are also the backdrop to pandemic governance in Argentina.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003321545-3