Pandemia y control social: narrativas sanitarias en la configuración de las Policías en Ecuador y Chile

The COVID-19 pandemic positioned issues of social control in the center of a high-stakes debate, which has been coined the health leviathan. In an historical sense, this idea is not modern. Rather, it responds to old dynamics with diverse rationalities that have shaped institutional policies in the framework of historical institutionalism, the disciplinary tradition that has accounted for organizational configurations over long periods of time. For this reason, through a hermeneutic review of the interpretation of authors and documentary sources, this article carries out a genealogy of the role of pandemics in the demarcation of the rationalities of police institutions in Latin America, with particular interest in the cases of Ecuador and Chile. It is concluded that the moral absolutist government, the bureaucratic mentality, the anti-drug leviathan, the prevention of violence and, currently, the concern for biosecurity are different moments in which police rationality has been constructed as a governmental problem. Although post-COVID reflection points to the fact that police forces have taken a health-oriented turn, historically they have always been shaped by “pandemics,” which is an excellent mechanism for envisioning the configuration of police institutions of the future.