History of Public Health in Latin America

Abstract

From the late 19th to the late 20th century, Latin America was a developing region of the world in which public and private health discourses, practices, and a network of agencies were consolidated. Many organizations appeared as a response to pandemics, such as yellow fever, that attacked the main ports and cities, and they interacted with global agencies such as the Rockefeller Foundation. Frequently, single-disease-focused and technocratic approaches were promoted in a pattern that can be defined as the “culture of survival.” However, some practitioners believed in public health programs as a tool to improve the living conditions of the poor, the most important being comprehensive primary health care, which emerged in the late 1970s. Toward the end of the Cold War (ca. 1980s), neo-liberal reformers supported a restrictive idea of primary care health that overemphasized cost-effectiveness and efficiency.