The three top photos included in this article are from the digital exhibition “Documenting the Impact of Covid-19 through Photography: Collective Isolation in Latin America,” curated in collaboration with ReVista and the Art, Culture, and Film program at Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS.)

The exhibition, based on an Open Call for Photography launched in July 2020,  aims to create a critical visual record of our unprecedented times so they can be remembered by future generations. 2020 will be remembered as a watershed year in which a pandemic laid bare the inequalities and fissures within our society. It has also underscored the importance of living and participating in communities even while experiencing the pandemic in isolation. The exhibition seeks to promote a regional perspective from Latin America and the Caribbean of the collective isolation imposed by Covid-19.

Dusk Phase 3 #5 by Miguel Tovar, Mexico City,

A few days before the mandatory quarantine was declared in Chile, I thought it was best to leave Santiago. We knew the situation was very serious, but we did not know how the pandemic would actually be experienced. I know how to live with an earthquake; as a historian, I know about the effect of the ancient plagues. But a pandemic, and especially a global one, was so very unknown. I also didn’t know that no one else knew. I didn’t prepare anything to leave. I just took my medical kit (at my age, medicines are indispensable) and my computer, even more indispensable. That was all. However, and even now I don’t know how, my intuition was this would be very long. So I packed all my research material, three years of archives from remote places in the Chilean south, Berlin, Paris and long research trips to Rome. I set off on the already crowded highways. Could it be that all of us were getting out of Santiago?  As if one could really get out of the pandemic! Like me, they were going to shelter themselves.

I have a small house on a family property very close to Santiago. It is in a beautiful valley with just houses on the side of the road and many small stores that all sell the same things. In the valley, there are no coffee beans. That’s the only staple I brought with me.  I could leave behind the trips to the supermarket, filled with frenetic shoppers. The panic of others produces panic in me. I was not afraid of the virus. I’m from the countryside and I spent my childhood around cow and horse dung, fruit that we never washed, stuck in ditches. My parents considered that was the best vaccine and life has proven them right. To keep myself isolated was not a great effort. I had to set up “rural Internet,” which resulted magnificent because the signal frequently failed.

Installed in this strange experience, the beginning came from the news. It was a dull fear. Our health system struggled to avoid having “the last bed taken,” a reality that came closer and closer. Behind these images of the world’s great cities in solitude and silence appeared the indisputable text that the world was changing. I have lived through this solitude and silence only once before: September 11, 2001, in Washington DC. The night before, I had taken the train from New York, the last night. The next afternoon I spent walking with my sister every place that security permitted.  And it was a lot of walking. In this silence and solitude not shown on television, I felt that if we children of the Cold War felt that its end was our victory and the almost definitive salvation of democracy, terrorist fundamentalism showed us other forms of violence that paved the way to new wars and new discriminatory behaviors. The silence. I took the plane back to Chile the first day Reagan Airport reopened. No one spoke a word. The lines of passengers, judging by their clothing, appeared to be Arabs. We foreigners all appeared suspicious and we will keep on appearing that way in this so beloved country.

Supermarket by Luis Weinstein, Santiago de Chile

Returning to today’s situation, the syndrome of the last bed was accompanied the syndrome of the last job. The economy was collapsing and unemployment increasing. Serious economists tell us that it will take 15 years to recover the pre-Covid level, which was not very good either.  We were suffering not only with the victims, but with this devastating poverty and the phantom of returning to be as poor as we have been historically, rather than emerging as a tenuous middle-class country.  I remembered how, as a quite young woman, I experienced that other September 11, that of 1973: a failure. A failure that for me was not the demise of a popular revolution, but the destruction of Chilean democracy. On September 11, a project was buried that had possibly begun in 1964 with a democratic election, of an inclusive modernization in the context of a genuine participatory democracy.

I was shaped intellectually in the dictatorship. I do not have to comment on that horror. The conquest of democracy and the transition were really difficult. All of us are generals after the battle, but what is certain is that those who criticized the transition at the end of the 90s did so with unprecedented disdain and   maximalism. But at the end of the day, it was an attack on politics in and of itself, that is, the necessity to lead and negotiate. If politics does not negotiate, then the most probable thing is that it is a dictatorship.  Later, a significant sector of the Concertacion—the alliance of left-leaning and centrist political parties—began to vilify their own works, ashamed that the youthful students mobilized in 2011 denounced them as “neoliberals” and continuers of the dictatorship. The lack of confidence in institutions, as happened all over the world, grew and grew; economic development was stagnating and this enormous population that had left poverty behind, and these new middle classes, rightfully felt that they had done their part with great individual effort and that the state had not kept up its end of the bargain with first-rate public services.   Discontent was evident. Politicians and analysts seem to have been ignoring the evident not to have anticipated the social explosion of October 18, 2019.  But that is a fallacy. The ruptures were not forseeable. There are moments when structure and context converge and they acquire their own dynamics. I was thinking about all this as I drove from the city to the countryside.

The explosion of October 18 was made up of very diverse groups. The million and a half Santiago residents that took to the streets are distinct from the youthful groups who persisted in violence that in turn had distinct profiles. One more political and the other of vandalism. But they shared a visceral rejection of all forms of power. I live squarely in the “zero zone.” I could see how the protesters operated in a more organic form than it appeared, but in a horizontal fashion, without leadership. The police officers—known in Chile as “carabineros”—showed not only a gross strategic ignorance but, what was even worse, returned to a violation of human rights. Finally, there was an important political channeling through Parliament for a new constitution. These youth—it was learned that the majority of them were highly educated—cried out with angry slogans against the last decades. “It’s not 30 pesos [the subway hike that set off the explosion]; it’s 30 years.”

Av Pedro de Valdivia, Sanitation of Graffiti  by Luis Weinstein, Santiago de Chile

If at the tender age of 18, I had felt the collective failure of democracy’s destruction, in October, I felt the personl defeat of my generation, that had fought against the dictatorship and had participated in democratic reconstruction. At the end, it was a cultural defeat. “Neoliberalism” was a concept that marked the continuity between dictatorship and democracy. My God, this was a blow!

And now the pandemic.  While the weeks passed, reflections about how the world would change proliferated and I followed them with genuine interest. I couldn’t stop thinking about the black plague. Between  30 and 50% of the European and Asian population died then. Today the deaths have not reached 1%. And the world feels each death as its own. Life matters a lot more to us now than in those times when it was easier to die than live. The Black Plague was also one of the causes of the end of feudalism. The analogy gives me a certain optimism. Not because capitalism is going to fall, but because the illustrated logic of progress, that  of time only as mechanical, in which “more” is always equivalent to “better” has entered into a crisis, made evident by the pandemic.

One morning I went to visit my neighbor Claudio Carrasco.  His father had received a parcel of land during the agrarian reform. He had inherited two hectares that he worked with care. He was a talented carpenter. He had a mare, Lolita, he loaned me now and then. As he brushed her down,  he commented to me how life had changed. “People behave themselves better now in the parties and birthday festivities and on Sundays,” he told me. “They drink less and because there are fewer people, we converse more now.” I think he caught my look, which was somewhere between surprised and moved. “People converse more now?” I asked him.  He kept brushing his mare, making her beautiful, and replied, “There’s more time.”

That night I had to participate in a television interview. The question about the significance of the pandemic for future was obvious. Breaking the silence that was a mixture of defeat and fear, I answered with a voice that was more clear than strong:

“Time,  the value of time, the sense of time.”