The Thin Line Between Farce and Tragedy: My COVID Story Between Italy and Guatemala

In his scholarly article, “The Thin Line Between Farce and Tragedy: My COVID Story Between Italy and Guatemala,” Italian researcher Lorenzo Gasbarri compares legislative responses to COVID-19 in Guatemala and Italy to highlight the failures in the Guatemalan government response. One key issue in Guatemala was the lack of publicly accessible information, compounded by systematic under-reporting of COVID-19 statistics. While both countries imposed early lockdowns with increasingly tight restrictions, Guatemalan measures quickly intensified—curfews and border closures led to mass arrests, prison revolts, and a surge in organized crime. Gasbarri critiques the Guatemalan president’s assertion that “the government had done what it could, and the pandemic was now the people’s problem” (Gasbarri 1354), made amid a mounting humanitarian crisis.

The state’s inaction was evident in its vaccine strategy, which relied heavily on foreign donations and suffered from minimal oversight. The arrival of the Delta variant accelerated the collapse of Guatemala’s healthcare system, which faced severe shortages of beds, oxygen, and medical personnel. Gasbarri’s article exposes the massive Guatemalan public health failure and points to the broader global inequities in pandemic response.