How to free people from “abominable practices”

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March 2019

The 1952 Bolivian Revolution
In April 1952, Bolivia experienced a social revolution that brought the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario  to power. Over a period of 12 years, until the MNR was ousted by a military coup in 1964, the party attempted to modernize Bolivia. The article Liberating the people from their “loathsome practices:” public health and “silent racism” in post-revolutionary Bolivia  explores the language that doctors and public health workers used to describe Bolivia’s indigenous population in the 1950s and 1960s.

Historian Nicole L. Pacino, Assistant Professor at University of Alabama in Huntsville argues that MNR used public health as a project of cultural assimilation, and that state-sponsored health programs sought to culturally “whiten” the indigenous population by transforming personal habits.

This article was published in the dossier Public Health Policy in Latin America and the Caribbean Oct-Dec 2017). It shows that despite the regime’s intention to move away from defining the rural population on racial terms, medical and political elites continued to define indigenous customs as an obstacle to progress and a remnant of an antiquated past.   Read in Manguinhos: Dossier Public Health Policy in Latin America and the Caribbean Oct-Dec 2017)

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