CEPAL Population Magazine pays tribute to Carmen Miró, the main exponent of Latin American critical demography

A diversity of articles that address highly topical issues and methodological and theoretical relevance in the field of demography and population studies, offers the latest edition of the Population Notes, the magazine edited by the Latin American and Caribbean Demographic Center ( CELADE) – Population Division of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

Number 115 of this publication, with a long tradition in the region, pays homage to Carmen Miró, the leading exponent of Latin American critical demography of all times and founder in 1973 of the ECLAC magazine Notas de Población, who died in September 2022.

In this context, this edition begins with a work by Carmen Miró on human rights and population policies, originally published in 1982, in which the author stresses that population issues require a look from the perspective of human rights. . Miró examined population policies, emphasizing that it was necessary to take precautions in the design of State interventions, taking into account the fundamental dignity of the human being.

Below, the thematic structure of issue 115 of Population Notes resumes the presentation of research on the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, which has been a distinctive feature in the last two years. The rest of the works refer to the situation of the Venezuelan migrant population in Argentina, social security in old age and homicides of children and adolescents in Mexico.

The first of the six articles that accompany this first tribute to Carmen Miró is the work of Marcela Cerrutti and Ana Penchaszadeh. The authors intend to describe the current situation of the Venezuelan population residing in Argentina, under the premise that the facilitation of migratory regularization has a direct and positive impact on their socioeconomic and political inclusion.

Next, Héctor Hernández Bringas presents his work on homicides in the population of minors in Mexico between 2007 and 2020. It is proposed to characterize this population, segmenting it into childhood and adolescence, in a period in which there is an increase in this type of crime in the country.

Sol Minoldo and Enrique Peláez are the authors of a conceptual work on social security in old age, a topic of great relevance today due to the irreversible aging process that the countries of the region are going through. Faced with this, they highlight that the Latin American context is far from that of developed countries, since the region does not have economic development or social institutions to deal with this sociodemographic situation.

Christopher Gómez Martínez, Eliud Silva and Karime Mejía Garduño are the authors of the following article, which analyzes a population of people recovered from COVID-19 in Mexico, which in May 2022 was just over 5 million people. Taking into account the consequences that the disease leaves in the population (pulmonary, vascular or serious damage to the thorax, which in turn could cause pulmonary problems in the medium term), the authors intend to locate and size the conglomerates of people recovered at the national level. municipal, taking into account some variables, such as age, the level of sociodemographic marginalization of the municipality in 2020 and the comorbidities of those affected.

Matías J. Belliard and Alejandro Sonis Giri are the authors of the work on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on life expectancy at birth (LEV) in Argentina in 2020. The authors recall that between 1950 and 2019 the global LEV it increased without interruption at an average rate of 0.39 years per year, from 45.7 years to 72.6 years. Thus, they claim that the COVID-19 pandemic declared in March 2020 halted decades of progress in terms of EVN. As documented by the authors, worldwide, life expectancy decreased by 0.92 years between 2019 and 2020, and 0.72 years between 2020 and 2021. In this context, they propose to investigate which were the most affected age groups and the major causes that contributed to the changes in the EVN, in addition to knowing to what extent the observed variations are attributable to deaths from COVID-19 or other causes of death.

The number 115 of Population Notes concludes with an article by Lina María Sánchez Céspedes, Yenny Andrea Marín Salazar and Natalia Marcela Palacio Martínez. The authors address the decrease in fertility rates at the subnational level in the first two months of 2021 and its relationship with the COVID-19 pandemic in Colombia. They consider several factors, such as the interruption of access to health services, the increase in unemployment and restrictions on mobility.

Population Notes is a semi-annual publication with 50 years of experience whose main purpose is to disseminate studies on the population of the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, although it also accepts contributions referring to other regions of the world.