The first cases of COVID-19 were detected in December 2019 in Wuhan (China). In early March, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the rapidly expanding illness a pandemic. With more than ten million people infected across the world as of late June, the effects of the pandemic on the world system reach far beyond the realm of public health; indeed, a reconfiguration of social life is underway. The crisis spread by neoliberal capitalism is intensifying, as is the increasing necessity for an urgent transformation of the system along an alternative path.

In Latin America, the first cases of the disease were detected at the end of February. Four months later, at the end of June, the number of people infected in Latin America has reached for more than twenty-three per cent of the global total and twenty-two of daily deaths as the rapid spread of the virus has turned the region (particularly South America) into the new global epicentre of the pandemic.