Boston College Law School’s Lex Latinx webinar series is a series of five online conferences in Spanish with simultaneous translation to English, with speakers from different Latin American Universities and BC Law Faculty discussing human rights protection during the pandemic as well as perspectives for the post-pandemic.
A few years after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez published his novel Love in the Time of Cholera.[1] Years earlier, the Swedish doctor Axel Munthe, who came to Naples in 1884 to treat the victims of a cholera epidemic, wrote his Letters From A Mourning City.[2] In both cases, an epidemic caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae is the background for deeply human stories (imaginary in Márquez’s novel and real in Munthe’s letters). Márquez and Munthe invite us to contemplate how it is possible to live “in the time” of an epidemic, as involuntary witnesses of human suffering, eager to help the most needy and aware of the risks of contagion.
Alejandro Olayao-Méndez, SJ contributed to a 9 July 2020 blog post on bmj.com. >>>
On 20 March 2020, the Trump administration announced that it would be limiting nonessential travel across US land borders [1]. Citing the threat of covid-19, the processing of asylum seekers or those who enter the US without appropriate documentation or authorization would, without delay or legal process, be deported [2]. These policy changes, and subsequent others, have created an acute-on-chronic health crisis amongst asylum seekers and migrants on Mexico’s northern border [3].
Consistent with previously unsubstantiated claims that asylum seekers pose a public health threat to the US, the United States government purported that these policies were needed to safeguard Americans from covid-19 [4,5]. Yet at the time of the announcement, there were over 17,000 confirmed cases of covid-19 in the US, compared to only 164 cases in Mexico, and 37 cases reported in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras combined [6,7].
Diamond, M., Novak, C., Testa, L., Olayao-Méndez, A. (2020, July 9). Cross-border implications of the US response to covid-19: an escalating health crisis on Mexico’s northern border. TheBJMOpinion. <https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2020/07/09/cross-border-implications-of-the-us-response-to-covid-19-an-escalating-health-crisis-on-mexicos-northern-border/>
