Los "diarios perdidos" de Manuela Sáenz y la formación de un ícono cultural (Dossier: Bicentenario, rastros y revelaciones de la Independencia)

La autora destaca la influencia de los “diarios perdidos” de Manuela Sáenz sobre el Diario de Paita (editado por Carlos Álvarez Saá), la biografía publicitada por el Museo Manuela Sáenz en Quito y la película venezolana de Diego Rísquez. Por otro lado, señala que la imagen de Sáenz ha sido apropiada como símbolo de causas cívicas o feministas, predominando la imagen de una atrevida transgresora de las normas de género, sexualmente pervertida, perturbadora del orden social. No obstante, el Museo y la película de Rísquez la presentarían como alguien honorable, e insistirían en la perseverancia del amor y lealtad de Sáenz a Bolívar. Hennes señala, además, que Rísquez trata las cuestiones de género y sexualidad respetando la complejidad e integridad de la Sáenz fílmica y de la histórica, que su performance de género le permite navegar los espacios masculinos y femeninos, para gozar de cierta agencia política y social en el círculo de Bolívar. Habría en la película y el Diario un lugar común, que no aparece en la literatura del Museo: la representación de Bolívar como figura trágica. Pese a sus discrepancias, los textos mencionados contribuyen a la construcción continua del ícono político, social y cultural.

Global Acceleration and Dispossesion: Regression in the Right to Life and Public Health during Ecuador’s Neoliberal Decades

The present essay’s central argument or hypothesis is, consequently, that the mechanisms accelerating a wealth concentrating and exclusionary economy centred on the benefit and overprotection of big business—with a corresponding plundering of resources that are vital for life—generated forms of loss and regression in the right to healthcare and the dismantling of institutional protections. These are all expressed in indicators from 1990-2005, which point not only to the deterioration of healthcare programs and services but also to the undermining of the general conditions of life (social reproduction) and, in contrast to the reports and predictions of the era’s governments, a stagnation or deterioration in health indicators, especially for those most sensitive to the crisis. The present study’s argument is linked together across distinct chapters. First, we undertake the necessary clarification of the categories central to the understanding of a complex issue; clarifying the concept of health itself and its determinants, emphasizing the necessity of taking on an integral understanding as a fundamental prerequisite to unravelling what documents and reports from this era either leave unsaid or distort. Based on that analysis, we will explain the harmful effects of global economic acceleration, the monopolization and pillaging of strategic healthcare goods; not only those which directly place obstacles on the access to health services, but also those like the destructuration of small economies, linked to the impoverishment and worsening of living modes. Thinking epidemiologically, we intend to show signs of the deterioration of broad collectivities’ ways of life as a result of the mechanisms of acceleration and pillage. We will then collect disparate evidence of the deterioration of human health and ecosystems to, finally, establish the most urgent conclusions about this unfortunate period of our social and medical history.