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.