Latin America at the margins? Implications of the geographic and epistemic narrowing of ‘global’ health

Abstract

To explore the narrowing of the concept of ‘global’ in global health, this article traces how Latin America has held a place of both privilege and power as well as marginalisation in the field. We employ a modified extended case method to examine how Latin America has been ‘seen’ and ‘heard’ in understandings of global health, underscoring the region’s shifting role as a key site for research and practice in ‘tropical medicine’ from the mid-nineteenth century through World War II, to a major player and recipient of development assistance throughout the ‘international health’ era after World War II until the late twentieth century, to a region progressively marginalised within ‘global health’ since the mid-1980s/1990s. We argue that the progressive marginalisation of Latin America and Southern theory has not only hurt health equity and services, but also demonstrates the fundamental flaws in contemporary ‘global’ thinking. The narrowing of global health constitutes coloniality of power, with Northern institutions largely defining priority regions and epistemic approaches to health globally, thus impoverishing the field from the intellectual resources, political experience, and wisdom of Latin America’s long traditions of social medicine and collective health.