IN MEXICO CITY and Lima covid-19 patients are once again being turned away from hospitals with no beds to spare, while in Manaus, in northern Brazil, a new variant of the virus is killing a hundred people a day. The pandemic's recession pushed 33m Latin Americans below the $5.50-a-day poverty line last year, according to the World Bank. Governments in the region are struggling to line up vaccines. So it may seem like a strange moment to be talking of a new social contract-an abstraction. Yet the term has become a mantra in Latin America. Both the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the OECD, a group of mainly rich countries, are working on hefty reports related to the subject. That is because the pandemic has exposed long-standing fragilities. The region's health-care and social-protection schemes are fragmented and unequal. Its economies have stagnated for the past six years, largely because of low productivity. Political systems are discredited. Citizens are angry. People sense that Latin American democracies cannot carry on like this. The question is how much and how quickly can they change.
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