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The journal publishes original manuscripts that address Latin America and the Caribbean from any of the disciplinary approaches of the social sciences and humanities. Researchers from all over the world are welcome to submit their manuscripts, in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.

El Estado, la Ciudad y el Virus: Una explicación política de la crisis del COVID-19 en Guayaquil

By Pablo Andrade, Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Ecuador

One of the localities most heavily affected by the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic was the Ecuadorian city of Guayaquil. Despite the media attention given to this development, and the now abundant literature on the pandemic, there have been no attempts to explain the Guayaquil crisis. Using a case centric process tracing the present investigation argues that the existence of two differentiated political regimes, one acting at the national level and the other at the sub-national level (Guayaquil), caused the simultaneous collapse of the city’s public hospitals and funeral services. The phenomenon studied is relevant both for the literature on subnational regimes and for discussing public health policies.

https://www.iberoamericana.se/articles/10.16993/iberoamericana.532/

A Tale of Tailings: The Origins of the Argentine Vice Presidency

By Ariel Sribman Mittelman, Stockholm University, Sweden

Throughout the independent history of Latin America, and especially during the decades after the Third Wave of democratization, the vice presidency has manifested itself as an institution of great political relevance. However, the knowledge about the origins of this office is startlingly scarce, and usually limited to the idea that it was modeled after the Philadelphia Constitution of 1787. There is actually much more to its genesis than that, and within that territory lie the keys to understand the current performance of this office. But that history has never been investigated thus far. This article aims to fill that gap in the literature for the Argentine case, enriching the scrawny reference to imitation with a fourfold argument based on the following elements: the growing trend towards receiving foreign influences through the period 1810–1853; the growing influence of the United States, which will be evident in the 1853 text and even more so in its reform of 1860; the little importance given to the presidential succession (both in Argentina and in the United States); the haste with which the Constitution of 1853 was written.