Carlos Sanchez Berzain Abogado | Estadista | Político | Politólogo
Carlos Sánchez Berzaín
April 15, 2020
(Interamerican Institute for Democracy) The Coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) has paralyzed the world forcing governments to subject their peoples to confinement in order to control the emergency. This measure is taking the planet’s nearly 600 million people to poverty. Confinement and quarantine are emergency measures that are necessary but unsustainable, in the long-term, that are partially complied with specially in Latin America that is known for the people’s informality and inequality. The Coronavirus has wrecked the structure of our social interaction and to overcome it demands we change the social relations’ paradigms creating new conditions and methods to restore our activities of daily living.
We cannot stop the disastrous disease from spreading, but what we can do is to control how we respond and manage such disease. Crisis Management is what makes the difference and with the Coronavirus the factual reality demonstrates that the most sensible strategy has -as a minimum- the political, health, and economic components.
Thomas Kuhn in his book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” called “paradigms” the “universally recognized scientific achievements that, for a time, provide model problems and solutions for a community of practitioners…” that “are rather incomplete for leaving many problems to be resolved by the group…”. In Social Sciences “paradigm is used to identify all those experiences, beliefs, and values that impact and condition the way a person sees reality and acts in accordance with”. Social paradigms are “behavioral models that we routinely apply in our life and that simplify the way we act”.
The COVID-19 pandemic has altered, and in some cases superseded, our social behavioral models. It has fractured the people’s routine, and compels everyone to new behaviors such as the “social distancing”. There are already new social interaction behaviors that have been imposed by the Coronavirus new paradigms. For example, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the highest official in charge of the fight against Coronavirus in the country, stated that “shaking hands” a very western custom “must be forever eradicated to avoid new infectious flare ups in the future”.
In its essay “The Price of Dignity”, the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief (OXFAM) states that “between 6% and 8% of the world’s population could be driven to poverty as governments paralyze the economy to control the spread of Coronavirus”. This is saying that “the number of people living in poverty could increase by between 434 and 611 million people”. With such an additional number of poor, those who were already poor, prior to the pandemic, would be condemned to famine?
According to a report by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), in 2017 Latin America passed Sub-Saharan Africa in having “informal employment” that is estimated to be 46.8% of the total employment in the region, meaning that around 130 million Latin Americans have informal employment. Informality in employment is growing and ranges from 30.7% in Costa Rica to 73.6% in Guatemala, with employment indicators of 36.5% in Brazil, 46.8 in Argentina, 49.3 in Ecuador, 53.8% in Mexico, 54.5% in Colombia, 64% in Peru and information from the UN’s International Labor Organization (ILO) indicating that “informal employment exceeds 70% in Bolivia, Honduras, and Nicaragua”.
The “informal economy” or irregular economy, is “that economic activity which is invisible to the Government for reasons of evasion of taxes or administrative controls”. According to a 30th of April of 2018 ILO report, “the informal economy employs over 60% of the world’s active population”. Generally, informal employment produces day-to-day or short-range income, that makes it cease abruptly anytime this employment is interrupted.
Under these conditions, with prolonged quarantines and confinements, there is no way to compensate the informally employed for lost income, nor is there a way to provide them the means for survival, which takes those who are most negatively impacted to sooner than later to have cause for rejection and non-compliance with control measures, creating scenarios to activate destabilization of governments and attempt against freedom, human rights and democracy.
This is why it becomes urgent to include the political element in crisis management, so that leaders and governments from throughout the world activate, as soon as possible, the mechanisms to forsake quarantines and confinements. To push a change of social relations’ paradigms and activate the society at-large with measures that prevent the spread of the disease but that do not strangle the citizenry, condemning them to misery and disregard.
*Attorney & Political Scientist. Director of the Interamerican Institute for Democracy.
Published in Spanish by Infobae.com Sunday, April 12, 2020
Translated from Spanish by; Edgar L. Terrazas, member of the American Translators’ Association, ATA # 234680.