Premium
Putting Large‐Scale Infrastructure Projects First: The COVID ‐19 Pandemic in Indigenous Mexico
Author(s) -
Hofmann Susanne
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
bulletin of latin american research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.24
H-Index - 33
eISSN - 1470-9856
pISSN - 0261-3050
DOI - 10.1111/blar.13182
Subject(s) - indigenous , pandemic , prosperity , political science , misinformation , economic growth , scale (ratio) , recession , development economics , covid-19 , political economy , sociology , geography , economics , law , medicine , ecology , cartography , disease , pathology , infectious disease (medical specialty) , keynesian economics , biology
This article argues that whilst indigenous people are central to the Mexican president's official developmentalist discourse of bringing prosperity to the country's marginalised and poor, their needs during the COVID‐19 pandemic have not been met and their interests have been sidelined. Whilst experiencing serious loss of trading revenue, negative impacts of misinformation, and lack of access to appropriate healthcare, indigenous Mexicans also faced the aggressive advance on their territories of large‐scale infrastructure projects, which have become the backbone of the president's strategy for countering the economic recession caused by the pandemic. The discontinuation of relevant legal means to challenge the advance of the megaprojects during the pandemic effectively threatened indigenous people's democratic rights to protect their land, identities and way of life.