Latin America has surpassed more than five million instances of Covid-19 to overtake North America, with 4. 8 million instances of Covid-19, as the maximum region affected by the coronavirus pandemic. This astronomical buildup in Covid-19 cases has been accompanied by a corresponding large-scale economic disaster. According to a United Nations direction note entitled “The impact of COVID-19 in Latin America and the Caribbean”, “Parts of Latin America and the Caribbean have hot spots of the coronavirus pandemic (COVID19), aggravated by social coverage poor health and fragmented health. systems and deep inequalities. COVID-19 will lead to the worst recession in the region in a century, causing regional GDP to contract 9. 1% in the 2020 Array. 28 million are grossly deficient (compared to 96 million in total), putting them at risk of malnutrition. The additional note from the third class specifies that “the sharp decline in economic activity is expected to reduce the unemployment rate from 8. 1% in 2019 to 13. 5% in 2020. The poverty rate is expected to rise to 7. 0% in 2020, to 37. 2%, while excessive poverty is expected to increase through 4. 5%, from 11. 0% to 1. 55%, representing an accumulation of another 28 millions of people.
Structural adjustment programs and public health system
Rather than being inexplicable and unprecedented, the existing fitness crisis in Latin America is deeply rooted in the neoliberalization of the economy across the continent. Beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, Latin America witnessed the advent of neoliberalism in which capital accumulation and anguish intensified. This neoliberal restructuring took place through structural adjustment systems (SAPs) that consisted of two phases. The first phase consisted of “stabilization” or the obvious achievement of macroeconomic stability. In this case, stability has been interpreted as a suitable investment climate for the marauding operations of multinationals. Therefore, when this stability arrived, the subsidies for transportation, food and other publics were eliminated; dangerously reduced public employment; and the authoritarian austerity in the form of cuts in school spending and fitness has dealt serious blows to the social fabric of the Latin American continent. After the first stabilization phase, the moment phase has arrived, comprising: “(1) the liberalization of industry and finance, which opens the economy to the global market; (2) deregulation, which separates the State from making economic decisions and mediating capital-labor relations; and (3) the privatization of patterned public spheres that can hinder capital accumulation if criteria of public interest are maintained as opposed to personal gain.
As the guts of Latin America opened up to the bandits of neoliberal capitalism, the continent temporarily witnessed the total destruction of its fitness infrastructure. With the implementation of SAPs under the watchful eye of the International Financial Institutions (IFI), the Latin American fitness sector has gone through a painful process of underfunding, disorganization, deregulation and privatization. The destabilization of the fitness formula of an entire continent was motivated and reported discursively through the World Bank document “Investing in Fitness”, a text committed to the sale of personal businesses. The World Bank document innocently asserts that “Greater reliance on the personal sector to supply clinical facilities, whether those included across a country as a must-have and those that are discretionary, can help increase efficiency. The sector staff already serve a giant and varied clientele in emerging countries and occasionally offer higher quality facilities without the long lines and insufficient materials found in government facilities. Here, the World Bank innocently forgets to mention the fact that personal fitness companies, fully involved with endless capital accumulation, are not interested in offering affordable and available fitness facilities to handicapped people The $ 3,000 coronavirus care payment demanded through personal agencies in Peru corroborates the lucrative nature of personal businesses.
Thanks to a manic accelerator of the privatization of fitness services, the IFIs, with the help of their SAPs, have succeeded in carrying out neoliberal reforms in the fitness sector in Latin America. Despite the heterogeneity that all countries manifest, “the fundamental elements of the reform are strangely similar and aim to make aptitude and facilities insurance a direct sphere of capital accumulation. However, since fitness care for the handicapped is not an exciting activity, the reforms tend to identify a dual fitness formula with a market-oriented sub-formula for the insured and a giant fitness sub-formula. personal participation and public assistance to the uninsured ”. The eventual dualization of the fitness sector into a deregulated privatized segment and an overloaded and underfunded public fitness formula has dramatically worsened the plight of the handicapped. Private companies, anchored in a matrix of government retirement market and increasingly reduced administrative budgets, have obtained access to new lucrative sites to obtain surpluses; the majority of the masses, on the other hand, experienced a degeneration of fitness facilities as austerity formulas reduced public spending on fitness, economically weakened public fitness control, and forced Latin American governments to adopt a “ Selective aid to the handicapped ”: a policy of getting rid of the universal fitness policy and offering minimal facilities to the“ most deficient ”and“ most needy ”.
As Latin American governments gradually withdrew from the market and began publicizing what the World Bank had cheerfully called “greater diversity and festival in the financing and delivery of fitness services,” epidemiological regulation and disease surveillance in the public fitness box was seriously damaged. A report through CSIS (Center for Strategic and International Studies) states: “Effective disease surveillance continues to be a challenge in the region. Outmigration of fitness professionals, limited location of gyms in rural and low-income areas , and the limited allocation of resources for emergency preparedness hamper the effectiveness of regional fitness systems Latin American countries spent less than 4% of their GDP on physical care.
The weakness of public spending on fitness in the Latin American administrations component has produced a domino effect in the neighboring dominance of the economy and thus exacerbated the economic crisis of the coronavirus. Due to the lack of a universal canopy and good enough public fitness facilities, low-income families are forced to increase their direct fitness spending. During the Covid-19 pandemic, these low-income families face an acute existential crisis: to avoid the fatal consequences of the coronavirus, these families desperately seek access to fitness care; by accessing fitness care, they incur “personal expenses that will force them to go into debt or sell their productive assets, plunging them into deeper poverty. ” This scenario is particularly pronounced in Latin America, where it is estimated that “On average, families in the region cover more than a third of the prices of physical conditioning services through direct bills (34%), while almost 95 million from catastrophic fitness expenses [financial contributions to the fitness formula that exceed 40% of a household’s non-vital income] and nearly 12 million other poorer people as a result of those expenses. “
Information and imperialism
The economic effects of low public spending on fitness in Latin America were amplified by two similar economic characteristics produced through past PAS. First, SAPs initiated the informalization of Latin America’s hard labor market through industry liberalization and industry deregulation, commercialization of agriculture, and layoffs in public services. With the penetration of the global capitalist dynamic in the Latin American economy, “there has been an explosion of other people who make a living offering whatever service they are to the market, since the casual sector has been the only means of survival for millions of others. persons. unemployed through the contraction of employment in the formal sector and through the uprooting of the remaining peasant communities through the incursion of capitalist agriculture. In the new period, 55% of the Latin American workforce is dedicated to the informal economy. Informal activities, avoiding contributions to social security and social charges, do not have access to unemployment benefits, physical fitness insurance plans and destination line insurance. Informal work, therefore, “is more vulgar, of poor quality and precarious, and lacks access to legal protection, fashionable money markets, formal education and formal social security systems. ” Consequently, staff enrolled in those casual activities are more exposed to the dangers of a big fitness surprise like Covid-19, given their pro insecurities and financial precariousness.
Second, the SAPs, through the liberalization of industrial flows, allowed free access of foreign capital. Thanks to the access of foreign capital, Latin America has imperialistly incorporated itself into the unequal arrangements of global capitalism and has a peripheral continent structurally subordinate to the central nations of capitalism. With the opening of the Latin American economies to corporations from the North, the countries of this continent have experienced enormous economic changes: Latin American countries have been reduced to mere exporters of express products; And with the consolidation of this export-oriented product structure, a simultaneous procedure of national deindustrialization took place, since foreign capital, concentrated in the express resources industry, exploited the country through low unit costs of hard work. -work and repatriate their gigantic profits. In general, the status quo of an export-oriented economy in Latin America has undermined national production capacity and increased external dependence on the North continent in the form of the need for imports. Array Therefore, “while Latin American countries export number one products like food, wood and minerals to the north, they tended to re-import manufactured products from those same countries. The added price of these manufactured products – regularly built from the number one inputs imported in the past – has generated benefits for the countries of the North while keeping the countries of Latin America in a perpetual industrial deficit.
In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, the destructive effects of imperialism and the counterattack are visible due to the lack of medical supplies in Latin America. According to the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), “Latin America and the Caribbean depend to a great extent on imports of medical products, since less than 4% of these products come from the region itself. out of 70 countries, adding 4 of the five most sensitive providers in the region, the first of which is the United States, have limited their medical exports in reaction to COVID-19. Export restrictions are hampering the supply of essential commodities to fight the pandemic in the region. »Through restrictions on exports of medical products, the countries of the global North are prohibiting the poorest countries of Latin America from accessing essential medical materials such as surgical masks, gloves, N-95 respirators, mechanical ventilators, tests, disinfectants. and other non-public materials. Protection device. The inability of Latin American countries to purchase medical devices locally is due to their longstanding presence in the global North, which has imperially plundered and undermined this continent’s national production capabilities for decades.
In Latin America, the catastrophic convergence of an economic and fitness crisis is deeply marked by gender. 86% of nurses in Latin America are women and due to this over-representation of women in the sectors most affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, female fitness personnel In addition, due to a fragile and overloaded public fitness system, women are forced to cope with excessive running conditions, such as long running hours, increasing the threat of coronavirus infection. Additionally, the domestic confinement of fitness staff families has compounded the stress and lack of confidence in women’s lives by expanding the burden of care. Despite all the threats and hardships female fitness staff endure, they are paid 28% less than men. This gender pay hole is the result of THE PAS which, by reducing public spending on fitness, has forced governments to segment the labor market on the basis of sex, allowing them to reduce policy-induced tension of fitness austerity.
U. S. hostility to socialized medicine
With the uninterrupted march of the Covid-19 pandemic, the desire for a new fitness formula for Latin America grows. While Latin America’s oppressed masses agree on the need for their continent’s fitness infrastructure, the United States, global hegemony, has continually underned regional efforts to radically repair the neoliberalist regime. Here, the examples of Venezuela and Cuba are suitable to express the hostility of the American empire towards socialist fitness care. In 1999 and 2000, Hugo Chavez’s Bolivarian government initiated the structure of a Socialist Medical Management composed of missions or missions, state-parallel social formulas and creatively controlled through network participation.
These missions have managed to create a robust, participatory and networked public fitness system. The Barrio Adentro mission, for example, has created well-functioning networked fitness centers, committed to the humanistic reason of treating patients who lose their rhythm: “Each networked fitness center has a multidisciplinary fitness team made up of at least one. a doctor specializing in built-in circle medicine, a network fitness employee and a fitness promoter. In addition, the medium is equipped with centrally purchased medicines that will be distributed to patients as needed. The staff at the fitness team lives in the neighborhoods. “
Enraged by Venezuela’s ideological opposition, the United States has fought an imperialist war of sanctions against the country, cruelly punishing it for providing physical fitness care to its citizens. The goal of this imperialist war to paralyze the state-owned PDVSA or Venezuelan oil, a vital source of income for an oil-dependent country. With the help of sanctions and its Arab ally, Saudi Arabia (which intentionally lowered oil prices), the United States has managed to particularly cut Venezuela’s economy and thus dismantle the country’s socialist economy. medical infrastructure.
Cuba is another country that has faced the wrath of the imperialist United States for socializing the medical formula through revolution. Thanks to an eternal economic war since 1959, the United States tried to undermine Cuba’s socialist formulas and destroy its public fitness experience. Despite U. S. continued efforts to economically destabilize the country, Cuba has maintained its foreign medical infrastructure and socialist fitness formula. Che Guevara wrote poetically in “Revolutionary Medicine” at the time in 1960: “The life of a single huguy being is worth a million times more than all the intelligence of the richest man in the world. . . much more vital than inteligente. es the pride of serving others. The gratitude of others is much more definitive and much more lasting than any gold that And each and every one of the doctors, in the course of their activities, can and should collect this precious treasure, the gratitude of others. “
As the Covid-19 pandemic intensified, anti-imperialist opposition in the United States grew. The total collapse of fitness care in the United States, the concomitant collapse of the fitness care formula in Latin America due to the neoliberalization of the continent and The External Dependence of the North, strongly highlights customers of a socialist fitness formula. Socialized medicine, which until then seemed unimaginable, is perfectly because the capitalist fitness formula sacrifices millions of people on the altar of profit and collapses under the weight of its own contradictions.
Yanis Iqbal is an independent student and editor founded in Aligarh, India and can be contacted at [email protected]. His articles have been published through magazines and Internet sites such as Monthly Review Online, Institute of Latin American Studies, Green Social Thought, Weekly Worker, People’s World, LA Progressive, News and Letters Weekly, Economic and Political Weekly, Arena, Eurasia Review, Coventry University Press, ZNet, Culture, Dissident Voice, Countercurrents, Counterview, Hampton Institute, Ecuador Today, People’s Review, Eleventh Column, Array Clarion , OpEd News, The Iraq File and Portside.
Originally on ZNet
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