Sick Latin America: intellectual interventions on Latin American condemnations and failures, 1898-1930

Abstract

In several newspapers in 2020 and press notes on the COVID-19 pandemic, expressions used by some nations made reference to historical phenomena, indicating the situations they were going through when facing the virus. A repertoire of ideas, images and metaphors were used that accounted for geopolitical and cultural hierarchies of the past. When Martí wrote that sentence, the notion of Spanish-speaking America as a sick space had a long tradition of reflections that explained the ills of the former Spanish colonies by pointing out different structural illnesses or pathologies. The diagnosis of American illnesses did nothing more than consolidate and acquire new vocabularies in the heat of end-of-the-century scientism. The war of 1898 had left Spain without its last colonial possessions, on the one hand, and, in parallel, it had shown that the United States was showing itself as a nation with the intention of having hegemony on the American continent.