Latin America is going through a rough patch: recession, increased poverty and inequality, bankruptcy of thousands of companies, crisis of political representation, and growing international marginalization are the most distinctive features of the region today.

The crisis is global. What is in question is the multi-dependency that goes to the heart of the sort of globalization that has taken place in recent decades, as well as the financial insecurity and ecological irresponsibility that go hand in hand with it (Boyer 2020). In this sense, the comparison with the Great Depression of 1929 is not very relevant. The causes of that crisis were rooted in the mismatch between widespread mass production and the absence of mass consumption. It is to Keynes’ credit to have identified this contradiction and proposed solutions to overcome it. The current crisis, caused by a coronavirus (COVID-19) whose origins and possible mutations are unknown, generates a much more radical uncertainty. There are currently no theoretical schemes capable of accounting for the complexity of the current crisis and its possible solutions.

This uncertainty is serious in the case of Latin America, which has turned out to be the worst hit region. With 8 percent of the world’s population, it accounted for 20 percent of infections and 30 percent of deaths caused by the pandemic by the end of 2021. Latin America is the region that has suffered most intensely the rigors of the pandemic, and its epicenter has been in Brazil.

In the economic sphere, the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) (ECLAC 2020) has estimated that the fall in the regional gross domestic product (GDP) reached 7.7 percent, the highest in 120 years. In contrast, the world economy, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) (IMF 2021) by 3.3 percent in 2020. Latin America’s performance also compares negatively with that of the Middle East and Central Asia (−4.1 percent), Sub-Saharan Africa (−3.9 percent), and Emerging and Developing Asia (1.7 percent). The macroeconomic figures, however, do not fully describe the depth of a crisis that, together with the loss of more than 1.7 million human lives, has brought with it the collapse of thousands of small- and medium-sized companies and enterprises.