Transitando del mito de la atención primaria en salud (APS) al cuidado integral e intercultural de la -salud y el vivir bien

This article reviews and characterizes the implementation of primary health care (PHC) as a strategy for the Global South and opens a discussion from Latin American and Caribbean critical health thinking about the construction of a category that allows for a new framework of political-health understanding and action in the territories and living communities of the South. The proposed category is comprehensive and intercultural health and life care, which is part of a new categorical framework of critical studies for the refoundation of health systems in the 21st century, the foundations of which are presented in this edition of the journal. This shift in epistemic frameworks involves, for the article, substantiating the myth of PHC and identifying the reproduction of coloniality in health knowledge for the Latin American Caribbean region. Based on a synthetic review and characterization, a critical discussion is proposed on the urgency of transitioning towards epistemologies of health care production from regional health autonomy and sovereignty. To this end, the key contributions of living well/good living from the Andean-Amazonian Indigenous nations are embraced, whose knowledge generates practices of know-how to produce territories of comprehensive and intercultural health care. The strategy seeks to move from disease care and primary care conceived as an individual and/or collective biological event to comprehensive and intercultural health and life care, conceived as a situated theoretical-methodological response to the determinations of the health-disease-care process in the demographic, intercultural, territorial, epidemiological, and socio-environmental contexts of the Abya Yala region of Latin America.