Citation

Ross N. Am. Anthropol. 2022; ePub(ePub): ePub.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2022, American Anthropological Association, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/aman.13756

PMID

35941986

PMCID

PMC9349755

Abstract

"What can COVID do to me?" Doña Paz asked me one day while discussing the COVID alert the Salvadoran government had just declared. Her question wasn't so much about her lack of concern about her health (or that of her children) but rather spoke to the multiple day-to-day worries and dangers she navigated. For Doña Paz, COVID-19 was less of an immediate threat than the quest to survive and stay safe in El Cerro, an urban area of illegal squatters with some of the highest levels of violence and marginalization in El Salvador.

In El Salvador, poverty has long been constructed as suspect and dangerous (Ross and Sanchez 2017). The social exclusion experienced by inhabitants of places such as El Cerro has allowed for early COVID-19 emergency measures to take the form of social triage (Biehl 2005). Through multiple forms of "threat governmentality" (Chappell 2006), the protection of the propertied class was made possible at the expense of people declared violent, of lesser value, and hence dispensable--state-crafted "bare life" (Agamben 1998). Confronted with the COVID-19 pandemic, the Salvadoran government immediately earmarked US$75,000,000 to build the largest hospital in Latin America. All the while, the strict quarantine measures made communities such as El Cerro desperate for basic food supplies. In a country that still suffers from the consequences of a twelve-year civil war (1980-1992), communities such as El Cerro raised white flags indicating hunger and desperation--surrendering to the military occupation that enforced the quarantine measures via roadblocks and street patrols...

Language: en