Usos del pasado, relatos épicos y construcción de alteridades amenazantes en América Latina en tiempos de pandemia.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic presents, in Latin America, a specificity which comes from the dimension that the nationalist discourse, the military epic and the resort to history have taken, in the governmental sphere as well as at the level of the civil society and the market. This narrative seeks to reinforce the internal harmony in the face of the crisis. However, by mobilizing a conflictive past and updating foundational stereotypes and dichotomies, it strengthens threatening alterities and generates new social cleavages within states, also affecting their relations with other countries in the region. This problem is viewed from a historical perspective, articulating various spatial scales, from the local to the global.