Horror and Solidarity: Collective Health During the COVID-19 Emergency in Guayaquil, Ecuador

In 2020, Ecuador was among the most affected places in the world in the context of the COVID-19 emergency. Serious problems of structural inequality and governance resulted in corpses lying in the streets of Guayaquil-Ecuador's largest city-while local communities resisted in different ways. We interviewed 18 participants who engaged in actions of solidarity during this context, critically analyzed their discourses, and generated relevant themes. There was a structural scheme of (pandemic) brutality that determined embodied experiences of horror, conditioned by a governance of abandonment and its related problems. To confront such horror, solidary community resistance focused on food, physical and mental health, management of corpses, community-led communication, online education, and political participation. We interpret that this was a process of social determination of collective health and discuss important theoretical, methodological, and ethical-political implications.