The Body Politic: Leftist Humanitarianism in Latin American Social Medicine

J Contemp Hist. 2025 Dec 12;61(3):599-632. doi: 10.1177/00220094251401605. eCollection 2026 Jul.

ABSTRACT

This article examines the transnational network of Latin American Social Medicine, represented by the Latin American Social Medicine Association (ALAMES), as a distinctive form of leftist humanitarianism that emerged during the Cold War. Amid fierce state-sponsored campaigns of anti-communist terror aimed at leftist ‘epistemicide’, this intellectual community was targeted for its critical, politically active stance on health. The article argues that the very effort to destroy the network paradoxically spurred its transformation into a resilient South-South solidarity movement. Drawing on oral histories and archival research, it distinguishes ALAMES’s humanitarianism from both traditional, impartial aid and the post-1970s ‘new humanitarianism’ based on liberal human rights discourse and NGOs. While other solidarity movements employed legalistic strategies, ALAMES’s humanitarian approach concentrated on creating and maintaining a critical epistemology rooted in historical materialism. It functioned by protecting persecuted practitioners, establishing institutional safe havens in Mexico and Brazil, and circulating clandestine texts (the ‘Libro Gris’). This history presents a decolonial counter-narrative to Euro-US accounts of aid, demonstrating how solidarity founded on a shared struggle dissolved the donor-recipient binary to generate a powerful critique of modern technocratic global health. It offers a framework for epistemic survival in contemporary conflicts where knowledge producers are deliberately targeted.

PMID:42282238 | PMC:PMC13252826 | DOI:10.1177/00220094251401605