Collective health and regional integration in Latin America: An opportunity for building a new international health agenda

HERRERO MB; JORGELINA LOZA; BELARDO, MARCELA

Social Inequities and Contemporary Struggles for Collective Health in Latin America

Routledge

Año: 2020; p. 59 - 70

There are socio-political intellectual traditions that contributed to the regional dimension as an entity with common features and also influenced agenda issues as well as regional policies that resulted from an own Latin American perspective. The objective of this article is twofold. Firstly, we explore the legacy of the Latin American Social Medicine/Collective Health intellectual trajectories in the emergence of a new regional health focus. Secondly, we analyze the nexus between those trajectories and the UNASUR Health policy, and its role as a hinge in the construction of a health agenda and the principles of South-South cooperation. In order to accomplish this analysis a study based on a qualitative approach was conducted, including primary and secondary data. The most relevant inference of our analysis is that a new framework of regional health integration and regional health diplomacy emerged in South America, where regional organisms have a growing centrality in the agenda of international health. An expression of this process is the emergence of UNASUR and particularly the creation of its Health Council. Most of its principles reflect the early values and the historical legacy of the Latin American Social Medicine and Collective Health intellectual traditions.