Citizenship and neoliberalism: pandemic horror in Latin America

Latin America has suffered disproportionately during the COVID-19 pandemic. The human impact has been chaotically and catastrophically evident across the three countries we examine here: Colombia, Chile, and Mexico. Those nations were already creaking under the effect of generations of neoliberal ideology: their intellectual, political, and ruling-class fractions had long-embraced its core project of redistributing income upwards and privatizing public goods, notably healthcare. In response to that raging inequality, uprisings had occurred through new citizen movements in 2019. They intensified in 2020 and 2021, as citizenship was enacted in powerful ways.