Heroes and villains: The adverse context of medical staff during the COVID-19 pandemic in Latin America and Spain

In this article, we look to comprehend how the pandemic context impacted sanitary staff, not just on their mental and physical health and working conditions, but also how they became the subject of, paradoxically, margination and social acknowledgment. What was the discourse usage in both cases? To attack or praise the labor of medical staff during the pandemic, and what actions were organized by the medical workers to surpass the glitches and the adverse context in which they were forced to work? The Fieldwork focused on the analysis of news shared on the Internet. We emphasize media coverage because it was through the media that these maltreatments were widely broadcasted, but the media also focused on how the public hofocused medmediaeven the sbecause demonstrations of medical staff protesting the attacks and asking for better equipment also focused on combating the virus. The geographic scope includes cases from Mexico and Spain during the first semester of 2020, but we also include news from other Latin American countries. The final outcomes will show how the pandemic context placed the medical workers in a confronted state: considered as pariahs and villains, they were the subject of aggressions or praised as heroes receiving public cheers. However, as it will be possible to observe in the conclusions, none of these positions helped to improve their labor and health conditions during the pandemic, but worsened.