Latin American Communities Research Articles

Walking the Elephant: Drawing as enactment of community

Abstract The Elephant and Castle neighbourhood in London is well known as a centre for the Latin American community in the UK. The drastic demolition of the site threatens their continued presence. This article chronicles my work as an illustrator on a project that sought to represent this migrant community, their vibrancy, and vitality on the cusp of the site’s erasure. Through a series of participatory, creative workshops a range of illustrative documents were produced that, ultimately, became archival records. Working on the project enabled a reflection on the role of the illustrator in the context of cultural devastation, and retrieval and preservation of the relationship between migrants and the spaces they occupy. This gave rise to a deeper set of questions about the nature of community as such. Drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophical work on community and Hannah Arendt’s writing on the public realm, I argue that this illustration project visualises and materialises experiences and expressions of community at a moment when this sociality was itself under threat.

(469) The High Incidence of Female Orgasmic Disorder Secondary to Premature Ejaculation in South Florida

Abstract Introduction Premature ejaculation (PE), according to the ISSM Committee, is defined as ejaculation with vaginal penetration that always or nearly always occurs prior to or within about one minute from the beginning of a sexual encounter, together with the inability to retard ejaculation with vaginal penetration. As a result, the personal life of an affected individual may be negatively impacted, with the consequences of distress, bother, frustrations, and/or avoidance of sexual intimacy. However, there are multiple factors to consider and not all sexologists, psychologists, and therapists agree about a clear and complete definition of PE. This, in turn, makes it more difficult to have clear statistics of the incidence, prevalence, and frequency of this disorder. On the other hand, Female Orgasmic Disorder (FOD) is defined as difficulty, delay, or inability for a woman to reach orgasm in a sexual encounter or the reduced frequency and/or intensity of orgasm. While PE and FOD are usually described separately in the medical literature, we have found in both the sexological literature and in practice that women with FOD are frequently the partners of men with PE. Objective The objective of this review is to address the increased incidence of FOD secondary to PE in the South Florida Latin-American population, its impact in the sexual function of both male and female partners in their relationship, and the possible reasons for the difference between the Latin-American community and the General population of the United States of America. Methods This is a retrospective review of the sexological literature and the statistics we have collected from patients over the last 20 years, in which around 80% of cases of women with FOD are due to PE in their partner. Results Nationally speaking, the frequency of FOD secondary to PE has been reported to generally run between 35-50% in reproductive aged women. Throughout the years we have noticed that this frequency is markedly higher in the Latin-American population of South Florida, reaching 79.6% of cases. Conclusions We do not have a clear explanation for this important difference between the General population of the United States and the Latin-American population of South Florida, but we know that the Latin-American population in this area is exposed to a great number of stressors. One such set of stressors that may be a contributing to the increased incidence is known as the “Immigrant’s Syndrome,” a set of circumstances which includes sexual dysfunction as one of its components. Disclosure No

(194) Dyspareunia as a Sign of UTI

Abstract Introduction Dyspareunia has been defined by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists as pain with sexual intercourse. While dyspareunia has been described as only a part of the symptomatology spectrum of interstitial cystitis, it has never been used as a primary symptom to diagnose uncomplicated or complicated UTIs. Dyspareunia and lower abdominal pain are the most common symptoms followed by dysuria, urodynia, pollakiuria, urgency, nocturia, tenesmus, headache and fever. Increased awareness of the association of dyspareunia with UTI’s will improve the diagnosis of UTIs. Objective UTI’s are under-diagnosed in emergency rooms, as clinicians increasingly rely on urinalysis rather than symptomatology. The presence of dyspareunia is rarely inquired during an evaluation of the patient. The objective of this research is to inform clinicians that dyspareunia is a common symptom of urinary tract infections. By increasing awareness of the association between UTI’s and dyspareunia, clinicians will include it in the assessment of a patient, rather than relying solely on a urinalysis. Additionally, our objective is to educate the patient population that dyspareunia is not normal, and it is a medical condition that can be resolved and investigated. Methods In 2009-2010, a review of 3,000 charts was conducted to determine the sexual attitudes and behaviors of the female Latin American community in South Florida. Analysis of the data shows a correlation between dyspareunia and urinary tract infections, a finding that has not been described before. Results The association between a UTI and dyspareunia was found to be approximately 80% in premenopausal women of reproductive age. In post menopausal women, UTIs are the second most common cause of dyspareunia following vaginal dryness. Conclusions This analysis has determined that dyspareunia is a significant aspect of the semiology of a UTI, thus clinicians should be aware of this association in order to accurately diagnose UTIs in patients. Disclosure No

Reparation ecology and climate risk in Latin-America: Experiences from four countries

IPCC's Sixth Assessment is a landmark in recognizing social justice and local knowledge as imperative for successful climate adaptation; however, taking this new scientific consensus seriously has profound implications. While narratives of fossil fuel companies and closing climate windows often dominate climate politics, there is an urgent need for new thinking frames, especially given that everyday adaptations by the most vulnerable are often hindered by incumbent actors at more local scales. In response, this paper tackles the issue of climate risk and human wellbeing in Latin America from an emerging and innovative perspective: reparation ecology. Reparation is a heuristic category by means of which we systematize converging evidence about the responses of local Latin-American communities to severe socio-environmental crises that are closely connected to climate risks and to long-lasting threats to the wellbeing of human societies and ecosystems. The results focus on a comparative analysis of five case studies on nature-based urban adaptation in two low-income settlements in Brazil; local ecological governance led by actors from the organized civil society in Colombia; agroecological and just innovative food production systems in Ecuador and sustainable urban-rural food markets in Guatemala. Assuming the complexity of climate change from a culturally and geographically located perspective, the paper unveils the non-doomed, ecologically reparative character of these initiatives. It therefore contributes to the recent turn in the debate on climate risk, claiming that diverse groups of people and communities around the world are contributing to radical change, tuning their behaviors and social arrangements in what an emerging scholarship defines as reparation ecology.

Effects of migration and vaccination on the spread and control of yellow fever in Latin American communities: a mathematical modelling study

BackgroundWith the COVID-19 pandemic, the stigmatisation of migrants as mere vectors of diseases has worsened. Our goal was to assess how migration rates could affect yellow fever dynamics in Latin American communities, one of those being in Necoclí, Colombia, with 70 000 inhabitants and another 70 000 migrants annually waiting to access central America. MethodsThis modelling study used a susceptible, exposed, infective, recovered, and vaccinated compartimental deterministic model for humans and vectors and numerical simulations applied to three scenarios: (1) migration from an endemic community to a disease-free host community; (2) migration from an endemic community located in a migratory route to a disease-free community; and (3) Necoclí as a case study, evaluating the effects of vaccinating migrants upon arrival. FindingsThe type of vector and vaccination coverage in the host community were more relevant for the occurrence of outbreaks than migration rates, and effective vaccinations were able to reduce 55·68% of cases and 54·54% of deaths, but not eliminate them entirely because of the influx of exogenous cases. In Necolcí, assuming the number of migrants equals the resident population, the loss of herd immunity reached 50% every year, and in the case of an outbreak, there were from 3500 to almost 8000 cases of yellow fever in the city. InterpretationAlthough migration brings a virus to a community, it does not cause the outbreak outcomes. Therefore, as our results showed, the focus should be on vaccinations and working on vector control rather than blaming migrants. Vaccination could prevent even more cases if any proportion of migrants are already immune, but there are no reliable data on the proportion of vaccinated migrants and no expectation that people on the move will have their personal vaccination documentation on hand. With the increase in the migration of children younger than 5 years, there are increasing concerns about their vaccination history. This model represents many communities in Latin America and suggests that safe migration corridors can substantially contribute to the control of vaccine preventable diseases. FundingCoordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel.

The Past Web: Exploring Web Archives

The Past Web: Exploring Web Archives

Horizontal methodologies in community interpreting studies: Conducting research with Latin American service users in Aotearoa New Zealand

Community interpreting norms and research have been heavily influenced by a Western-centric community of practitioners and an individualist, positivist philosophy. This has resulted not only in an entrenched emphasis on professional interpreters’ detachment, neutrality, and invisibility but also in research which often ignores interpreting service users from culturally and linguistically diverse communities. This article addresses the complexity of operationalising horizontal methodologies during interpreting research in an effort to centre marginalised voices and epistemologies. The study involved a research project conducted with the Latin American community in Aotearoa New Zealand, employing horizontal one-on-one and group dialogues to assess interpreting service users’ views on allyship and social justice in spoken-language community interpreting. In this article, horizontal methodologies are presented as a culturally affirming way for Latin American service users to co-produce knowledge, and for Latin American researchers to engage with their own identity, recognise their impact on society, and challenge colonial research practices and interpreting norms.

Contemporary narcoterrorism in Latin America. A case of Colombia and Mexico

At the end of the Cold War, the term "narcoterrorism" was coined. This concept originally meant ties between drug dealers and terrorist organizations and the countries of the Soviet bloc. The definition of this phenomenon, developed later, is ambiguous and means both methods attributed to terrorists, applied by drug cartels and the financing of their activities by terrorist groups through drug trafficking. This article deals with the first of these meanings and discusses the situation in two Latin American countries. The Colombian Medellin cartel was the first to use typical terrorist measures. Criminals carried out bomb attacks on public buildings, planes and attacks on politicians. In doing so, they wanted to achieve the goal of preventing the extradition of cartel leaders. Mass drug production has been going on since the 1930s in Mexico, but at the turn of 21st century, local criminal groups monopolized drug trafficking routes to the US. In 2006, an attempt by the state to combat this practice resulted in a long-term "drug war", in which several hundred thousand people were killed. There has also been an unprecedented increase in crime in the world, to the point where about 100 people are killed at the hands of the cartels in Mexico on a daily basis. The international community has almost unanimously labeled the activities of the Mexican drug cartels as terrorism. Only the opinion expressed in Mexican literature differed in that respect. The cooperation of these cartels with terrorist organizations turned out to constitute another threat to international security. This kind of cooperation can bring mutual benefits to terrorist groups and the countries supporting them – especially in the case of money laundering. The long-term operation of cartels has created the phenomenon of "drug culture" in Latin American communities, glorifying the terrorist activities of cartels and the figures of their leaders.

Balancing Cost and Demand in Electricity Access Projects: Case Studies in Ecuador, Mexico and Peru

Rural areas in developing countries have the highest concentrations of unelectrified communities. There is a clear link between electricity consumption and the Human Development Index, as highlighted by the 7th Development Goal of the United Nations. Estimating the energy needs of the previously nonelectrified population is imprecise when designing rural electrification projects. Indeed, daily energy demand and peak power assessments are complex, since these values must be valid over the project’s lifetime, while tight budgets do not allow for the systems to be oversized. In order to assist project promoters, this study proposes a fuzzy mixed integer linear programming model (FMILP) for the design of wind–PV rural electrification systems including uncertainty in the demand requirements. Two different FMILP approaches were developed that maximized the minimum or the average satisfaction of the users. Next, the FMILP approaches were applied to six Latin American communities from three countries. Compared with the deterministic MILP (where the energy and peak power needs are considered as specific values), the FMILP results achieved a better balance between the project cost and the users’ satisfaction regarding the energy and peak power supplied. Regarding the two approaches, maximizing the users’ minimum satisfaction obtained globally better solutions.

Migration Flows, Communities, Cultural Practices and Gender: A Literature Review of Latin American Migration to Australia

ABSTRACT The Australian Bureau of Statistics shows that between 2000 and 2019 Latin American migration to Australia increased by 262%. This percentage does not consider migrants on temporary visas. This article presents a critical review of 59 single publications. The findings suggest, firstly, that while the literature shows qualitative analysis of Latin American cultural practices, communities and gender, the study of migration flows is dominated by quantitative approaches that are focused mainly on permanent settlement. Secondly, while there have been several studies attempting to understand and problematize a homogenous Latin American identity in Australia, there is still little research exploring the heterogeneous cultural, social and economic experiences of migrants from these diverse regions. Finally, this review highlights the need to conduct quantitative and qualitative studies to explore Latin American temporary migration in Australia, examining how the increase of temporary visas is intersecting with the everyday life of these migrants.

Latin American Migrants in Australia: A Systematic Review of the Data and Literature

ABSTRACT Australia’s rapidly growing Latin American community is attracting increasing scholarly interest. This article builds a statistical and thematic profile of what we know from the scholarship about Latin Americans in Australia, and identifies key areas requiring further attention. Two methods were employed: (1) the first systematic review of the literature published to date on Latin American people in Australia; (2) a quantitative study of Latin Americans in Australia, using data extracted from the Australian Census 2016, and immigration information from 2016 to December 2019. Both focused on the question: “What do we know about the characteristics and adaptations of Latin American migrants in Australia, and what remains to be researched?” While there is considerable literature, many areas have been neglected. The most significant gaps are in the areas of political engagement; health and wellbeing (especially for children, men, and students); student experiences and pathways; gender; and trade and economics.

Evaluating the impact of a community health worker (Promotora de Salud) program on attitudes and beliefs regarding atopic dermatitis among Spanish-speaking Latin-American caregivers.

Community health workers (CHWs), or promotora de salud, have an important role in healthcare education and advocacy in the Latin American community. We aimed to determine the impact of a promotora de salud program on attitudes and beliefs regarding AD management among Latin American caregivers of pediatric patients with atopic dermatitis. This is a sub-study of an ongoing randomized, investigator-blinded, placebo-controlled trial. Mann-Whitney U tests compared questionnaire responses in the standard education group to the promotora group. Caregivers in the promotora group were more likely to state that they knew how to apply wet wraps and use bleach (sodium hypochlorite) baths at 1month (wet wraps p=.027, bleach baths p=.005) and 3months (wet wraps p=.005, bleach baths p<.001) demonstrating greater self-efficacy, defined as an individual's belief in their capacity to execute a certain behavior to achieve a desired outcome, compared with the standard education group. Culturally competent and language concordant educational interventions may improve confidence in utilizing wet wraps and bleach baths among Latin-American caregivers of children with atopic dermatitis, which may improve AD outcomes in the Latin-American community.

„Nada es absoluto, salvo la historia que no evoluciona…”: mnemohistoria w poszukiwaniach intelektualistów iberoamerykańskich

The article draws attention to the discussion on settling the difficult past of Latin America by presenting three mnemohistoric studies on Cuba, Argentina and El Salvador by Annarella O’Mahona, Daniela Goldfine and Héctor Lindo-Fuentes, Erick Ching and Rafael Lara Martínez. At the same time, he places them in the context of the cultural transformations of the Latin American community in recent decades.

Global Latin America in Times of COVID-19 and Hypermediations

This edition of the Journal of Latin American Communication Research (JLACR) discusses media issues and Latin American related topics during the year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The double volume puts together a group of essays that brings forward problems and concerns of a transnational Latin American community as it deals with the pandemic in Latin America, North America and Europe. The volume also includes a collection of essays analyzing the role of hypermediation in Latino music, ethnography, political participation and media engagement, and Latin America’s media representation image.

"It's in Our Veins"

A recent influx of Latin Americans into Edmonton, Alberta, has been met with a significant rise in interest in Latin music and dance. Many Latin dance studios in Edmonton are continuing to gain popularity with people of Latin American descent and many other Canadian cultural groups. This paper focuses on one Latin dance studio in Edmonton called ETOWN SALSA. Through a narrative interview with the owner, coupled with supplementary research about cultural identity tied to Latin music, this paper provides insight into how Latin dance studios’ presence helps develop and maintain diasporic Latin American identities. For many Latin Americans, music and dance are an essential way in which they can connect to their home countries. Not only can Latin dance help new immigrants find a sense of familiarity, but dancing can also help second or third-generation immigrants reconnect with their heritage. Our findings also suggest that non-Latin Americans who regularly participate in Latin dancing can identify and connect more with Latin American communities in Edmonton.

¡Printing the Revolution!: The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now

“Chicano”, “Chicana”, “Xicano”, “Chican@” and “Chicanx”; the term itself—once used as a slur against Mexican Americans—has been in a constant state of flux since the 1960s as it has grown to accommodate emerging cultural and political identities among Latin American communities living in the U.S. Published ahead of the re-opening of the exhibition this year, the lavishly illustrated catalogue iPrinting the Revolution!, edited by E. Carmen Ramos, now brings together the most famous images wiel...

Cognitive development of children in vulnerable contexts: the role of psychosocial intervention

ABSTRACT Psychosocial intervention programs are carried out in Latin American communities with socioeconomic disadvantage to improve their quality of life; few evaluations are carried out to measure their effectiveness. The study aimed to determine if intervention processes in vulnerable communities might favor the children's development. An analysis of variance was used to find the dependence between different intervention processes and the cognitive development of 97 children between 3 and 6 years old. No relationship was found between the type of intervention received by the communities and their infants’ global cognitive development. However, the children of the community intervened by multiple agents and services showed significant differences related to a better performance in dimensions such as language, rhythm, memory, and attention. It is necessary to ensure nutrition and guarantee quality education, early stimulation, spaces of relationship with peers, and a community aware of their co-responsibility in childcare to improve children's cognitive development.

Castellano Rioplatense in Australia

In an era marked by globalisation and migration, heritage languages and their use in particular societies is gaining interest. Yet, research into one of the world’s largest heritage languages, Spanish, has primarily focussed on the United States of America. This article examines an under-researched topic of the Spanish-speaking community in Australia. This heterogenous community is far more recent and has received far less scholarly recognition than that of its closely researched North American counterpart. Moreover, considering the complexity of language usage, heritage language research has concentrated on standardised use rather than on regional dialects. This directly influences the strategic significance of regional dialects as Latin American Australians are framed as a homogenous community to the broader Anglophone public. This article adds to the current body of research from a unique Australian perspective. Survey and interview data from 100 members of the Argentinian community explores their reasons and use of Castellano Rioplatense. It argues that Castellano Rioplatense is perceived to accrue status and is a means where Argentineans maintain a distinct linguistic and cultural differentiation within the broader Latin American community.

Latin American Network for Scientific Culture (RedLCC): A Regional Science Communication Initiative.

Scientific communication has been growing strong worldwide in the past decades. The use of modern data analysis tools to fine-tune its content, strategy, and effectiveness, together with the significative rise of social media, have contributed to such significative growth (Kappel and Holmen, 2019). Social media (such as blogs and microblogging) are powerful engines greatly incorporated into our daily lives for capturing information and as a social tool. As such, they are already being exploited for learning, discovering, searching, storing, and sharing knowledge (Lopez-Goni and Sanchez-Angulo, 2018). Research has shown that online media use increases scientific knowledge (Cacciatore et al., 2014; Su et al., 2015) and positive attitudes toward science (Dudo et al., 2011) therefore enhancing the learning and science process skills. Such scientific knowledge is a critical resource that enables political actors to inform and legitimate political decisions, and it is also important for non-scientific audiences in terms of forming public opinion about important political issues (Huber et al., 2019). Moreover, previous work has demonstrated that democratic societies that are scientifically literate make equitable choices regarding science-related policy issues (European Commission, 1995; Rudolph and Horibe, 2016). Thus, according to Marquez and Porras (2020), effective science communication and science literacy are socioeconomically imperative for all societies. At the same time, Science Communication can serve various diplomatic purposes. Particularly, science popularization initiatives, even when not targeted to policymakers or diplomats, can both raise awareness about international scientific cooperation and about locally produced science and technology which could be highly overlooked (Leach, 2015). English is currently the lingua franca of science. Currently, 98% of publications in science are written in English (Ramirez-Castaneda, 2020). This has facilitated the dissemination of knowledge across boundaries, but at the same time, the hegemony of English in science promotes and enforces the imposition of just one cultural point of view over others (Marquez and Porras, 2020). Because of that, generating science communication multilinguistic alternatives promotes diversity and creates culturally relevant content. Science communication in Spanish is especially imperative in Latin America. The intrinsic functional illiteracy, framed in the lack of economic and educational resources, inequality, poverty, political and social instability, are historical challenges that keep this region from unleashing its full potential (UNESCO, 2020). Moreover, and due to these issues, Latin America faces a human capital flight crisis, in which a high percentage of the individuals pursuing higher academic education end up emigrating and learning a second language. This is reflected in a marked lack of availability of educational resources in Spanish addressed to Latin American communities. Nevertheless, there have been efforts to build remote networks of Latin American scientists and science communicators that come together to counteract this effect. Three renown projects, different in nature, can be used as examples. First, the RedPop (Latin American and Caribbean Network for the Popularization of Science and Technology https://www.redpop.org) is a network of centers and programs created in 1990 at the request of UNESCO's program for Science, Technology and Society (Massarani et al., 2015). It encompasses around 80 science communication projects in different media platforms, but also science museums, interactive science centers, natural history museums, environmental parks, zoos, botanical gardens, and aquariums. Second, the bilingual science communication portal Latin American Science (www.latinamericanscience.org) publishes pieces written by scientist and science writers for the public both in Spanish and English-speaking countries. It focuses on regionally produced research, science policy and science-related stories from the region. And third, the Journal of Science Communication JCOM America Latina (https://jcomal.sissa.it/jcomal/index.jsp), an open access journal focused on science communication in Latin America and publishing contributions in Spanish and Portuguese (Weitkamp and Massarani, 2018). Still, more opportunities need to exist in term of communicating science with regional relevance. Blogs and social media platforms, which are especially open and easily accessible resources, have fantastic potential to address this gap since it is allowing information and education to reach every home to an unprecedented extent. One of these regional initiatives, the Latin American Network for Scientific Culture (RedLCC), brings together regional scientists that communicate science for Latin American communities and, in consequence, also nurtures the “Science for Diplomacy” dimension of Science Diplomacy.

Latin American Cancer Poetry: Medicine, Political Violence and Collective Memory

Latin American Cancer Poetry:Medicine, Political Violence and Collective Memory Daniel A. Romero Suarez Growth is a crucial aspect of the configuration of cancer. At the cellular level, the disease presents itself as an overgrowth of cells. Routinely, the immune system has enough self-regulatory mechanisms to eliminate abnormal elements promptly. However, some cellular mutations spiral out of control since human immunology is not infallible. A malignant neoplasm is formed when cells that have not matured correctly begin to reproduce endlessly (Nuland 209). The demand for nutrients increases exponentially, and after some resistance from the patient, “the masses of cancer cells kill the gradually sickening person after feasting on the nutrients that were to have sustained him” (212). From a socioeconomic perspective, cancer is a disease driven by modern economic growth. Macroeconomic progress has, indeed, increased the funding of biomedical research towards the development of new drugs and treatments. Yet the same economic variables that enabled the advancement of bioscience and the rise in life expectancy have also generated social changes that harm the general health of the population and increase the frequency of habits associated with cancer: The economies of Latin America and the Caribbean are growing rapidly, and the standard of living is increasing. Such growth is accompanied by increases in sedentary lifestyle, unhealthy dietary habits, smoking, alcohol consumption, environmental carcinogenic pollutants, sun exposure, urbanization, and population ageing. (Goss 391) [End Page 292] Cancer risk factors are usually seen as the result of a person’s decision-making. However, the self-focused view of risk factors ignores the large number of people who cannot avoid living in polluted environments or engaging in abusive work relationships that endanger their health. Whether due to economic activities such as mining or industrial agriculture, or just for living in highly contaminated cities, Latin American communities have been exposed to carcinogens without adequate protection for decades. While the implementation of neoliberal policies coincided with the increase in economic inequality and cancer mortality in Latin America, those economic reforms also coexisted with periods of political violence. Although diverse in nature and varying in length, the region experienced bloody periods during which armed groups reduced the value of human life drastically to adhere to cruel leaders’ ideological ambitions. In the last third of the 20th century, Latin American countries were governed by dictatorships whose missions were to annihilate any trace of communism. For instance, Augusto Pinochet ruled Chile for seventeen years (1973–1990) during which he persecuted dissidents ruthlessly. In Peru, Alberto Fujimori’s administration (1990–2000) became a dictatorship after the first year, when he dissolved the congress with the Armed Forces’ support, organization that was pursuing left-wing militants. Latin American cancer poetry is a mechanism of collective memory that, through the depiction of neoplastic patients, reconstructs the recent history of authoritarianism and socioeconomic precarity that affected the Latin American region since the 1970s. In their works, patient-writers have developed critical resistance to biomedicine, and to states’ discourses on recent political violence and the precarity produced by neoliberalism. In contrast to the cancer narrative that dominates Western medicine—which constructs the tumor as an opportunity to show personal strength in the face of adversity—Latin American poetry roots the neoplasm in the recent memories of how neoliberal, usually authoritarian, governments imposed new understandings of medicine. The cases of Chile and Peru show the foundational ambiguity of contemporary medicine: while scientific advances improve diagnoses and treatments, at the same time, the medical institution collaborated with governments to carry out political persecution, torture, forced disappearances and assassinations. [End Page 293] When Medicine Causes Damage: The Role of Doctors and Medicine in Chile and Peru Doctors were an unwelcome social group for the interests of Pinochet’s dictatorship. In past decades, Chilean healthcare had been influenced by the social medicine model promoted by Salvador Allende, both in his role as head of the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Social Assistance, and in the presidency of the southern country. In parallel, Ernesto “Che” Guevara (1928–1967) immortalized the socialist, revolutionary physician paradigm. In opposition, conservative doctors were harsh critics of Allende’s administration (1970–1937): In 1970, [Allende] was elected President, with a platform of nationalization...