Neoliberalismo y salud en la frontera de México y Estados Unidos. El caso de la tuberculosis

Abstract

The impact of the free market economic restructuring on public health systems during the last decades has been devastating to most parts of the world, including in the border communities of Mexico and the United States, a region on the planet where the model of neo-liberal globalization, combined with the maquilas industries and the North America Free Trade Agreement (nafta), were destined to showcase one of its most successful and brightest windows to the future. This economic rationality was accompanied by a move-ment of increasing privatization of the national public health systems, with its consequent substitution by a medical model, more compatible to the ideological concept of health as an individual's human capital, a commodity to be sold for a profit in the market, and acquired to be consumed by human beings turned into private owners of their own health. The present article concentrates in telling <<the case of tuberculosis>> in the U.S.-Mexican border, one of the reemerging transmissible diseases world-wide. This is a disease that is historically known to be linked to growing poverty, and sensitive to the problems related to migration and its criminalization by some social sectors, to the deterioration of living conditions (housing, food, sanitary infrastructure), to the dismantling of the public health systems, and recently aggravated by the combination with other diseases like VIH-SIDA and the diabetes.