The party is over: cracking under Sana Distancia in Mexico
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The party is over: cracking under Sana Distancia in Mexico Ricardo F. Macip 1 # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Keywords Mexico . Covid-19 pandemic . Political legitimacy The news regarding the spread and reach of coronavirus or Covid-19 struck early on. By the third week of January, a (ethnically identified Chinese) foreign family toured Mexico City and used Uber, among other means of transportation. The older man in the group was supposedly diagnosed with Covid-19 and was admitted to a hospital upon arrival in Los Angeles, California. After they have left Mexico City, Uber shut down 240 user accounts and put two drivers under observation (DW (DEUTSCHE WELLE) n.d., 2ND 2020). The news did not reach much beyond Mexico City and the attitudes towards the contagious disease were mostly ambivalent. Perhaps this story was true, Uber users thought, but if so, it could not be as bad as international broadcasters were depicting it. A few days later, it was no more than another expression of xenophobia identifying Chinese persons as the sources of potential danger (EHDP 1, 30TH 2020). As the weeks went by, the public who followed the news debated whether the pandemic was real, whether it was capable of reaching Mexico, and if it was real how serious it could be. Very few had the humility to accept the fact that they lack the education, much less the knowledge, to understand what was being talked about. This same scenario happened with authorities at all levels of the government as they became engulfed into the imbroglio. The news during February focused on the city of Wuhan in China and it was treated with exotic sensationalism. By early March, the contagion spread first to other Asian countries and then Mediterranean Europe and North America, which was when the World Health Organization declared it a pandemic (EHDP 3, 11TH 2020), prompting debates involving public figures, business leaders, foreign ambassadors, and academics. These discussions eventually framed the federal government’s only consistent approach to the pandemic, known as “Sana Distancia” (healthy distance), abbreviating the nonsensical use of “Jornada Nacional de Sana Distancia” (National Workday of Healthy Distance) as the official title for the policy. This was
* Ricardo F. Macip [email protected]
1
Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Puebla, Mexico
R. F. Macip
accompanied by the propagandistic mascot “Susana Distancia” (a cartoon young heroine) meant to help communicate the meaning behind the campaign. The most relevant aspect of the policy and campaign is that even though there was plenty of reliable and sanctioned information coming from the mismanagement of the emergency in Italy and Spain, in contrast to the tight measures taken in most of Asia, while the cases started to multiply in the United States, governmental officials seemed to compete in ignoring or relativizing the danger in a clownish fashion. True, an undersecretary of the Health Ministry was appointed czar for responding to the pandemic
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