Human Lives Human Rights: Latin America and the Caribbean region’s obscene socio-economic inequality has proven fatal during the Covid pandemic and the governments across must urgently ramp up to tackle the region’s inequality.
With only 8.4% of the world’s population, the region has endured 28% of total global deaths due to COVID-19.
According to a report published by the Amnesty International, countries with the highest inequality and lowest public spending on health and social protection suffered most during the pandemic, with the most devasting impacts on historically marginalized groups.
A human rights-based rethink of economic policies is key to avoiding future calamities in what is, by many measures, the world’s most unequal region.
Despite the staggering inequality and poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean, over the last decades governments have failed to collect sufficient tax revenues and to do so in a way that combats inequality, even during times of economic boom.
This has inevitably resulted in meagre spending on healthcare services and social protection – including unemployment, pensions and childcare support – which are vital for a life of dignity and to truly uphold human rights for all.
Governments have the obligation to proactively mobilize the resources needed to protect their populations from the worst impacts of discrimination, disease and economic disaster.
“If Latin American countries had done this in the decades before the pandemic, the region could have avoided so much pain and loss of life,” said Kate Donald, Acting Executive Director of CESR.
“Now is their chance to prevent the next inequality-induced disaster and make the shift towards a rights-based economy.”
Countries such as Mexico, Brazil and Peru, where the richest 1% of the population hoards over 30% of national wealth, have recorded the highest numbers of Covid deaths in the region proportional to their populations.
Chile, where the richest 20% of the population takes home 10 times more income than the poorest 20%, also has one of the region’s highest death rates per capita.
Governments have the obligation to proactively mobilize the resources needed to protect their populations from the worst impacts of discrimination, disease and economic disaster.
While many Latin American countries provided cash transfers during the pandemic, none of them expanded health insurance nor took sufficient action to implement universal social security mechanisms and expand coverage to ensure the most disadvantaged people were covered.
The impact of these shortcomings across the region fell most severely on women, who lost jobs at a higher rate than men and whose disproportionate role in caring for children and family continues to affect their unequal enjoyment of rights – even more so if they are Indigenous or of African descent.
Being born with a certain skin colour or growing up in a certain postcode should not determine your chances of dying of infectious diseases like Covid.
Two years into the pandemic, governments in Latin America have still not caught on to the urgency of implementing a human rights-based approach to recovering from the pandemic and tackling inequality.
Latin America’s present situation is the result of hundreds of years of colonial injustices that mean certain groups have been historically and systematically denied their rights.
As countries recover from the pandemic governments need to address this head on by adopting a substantive equality approach and affirmative action measures.
Moreover, many have regressive taxation systems with taxes that do not ask enough from those most able to pay, thus undermining their resources to overcome inequality and redistribute wealth.
Latin American countries depend heavily on indirect taxes – which are more regressive as they represent a larger burden for poorer sections of the population – and collect very little from wealth taxes which target economic elites.
Without boldly facing the need to tax more and tax better – as is their human rights obligation – countries in Latin America will continue to be dragged down by a malaise of socio-economic inequality, favoring a rich elite while harming society as a whole.
