ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author examines the motivations behind the launching of the campaign and Mexican responses to an effort at sanitation imposed. An important event for launching the eradication campaign in Mexico was the 1954 malaria eradication program approved by the Pan American Sanitary Bureau, today the Pan American Health Organization, the regional arm for the Western Hemisphere of the World Health Organization, an agency of the United Nations. The international and Mexican political and medical leaders who designed malaria eradication in Mexico were aware of the cold war political context in which they operated and in which they elaborated a common discourse and its metaphors. During the 1970s and 1980s, malaria eradication went further into decline because the political context of the cold war was vanishing. Latin American intellectuals criticized "modernization," arguing that it was ethnocentric because the past of their nations did not resemble the past of the United States.
