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Paper short abstract

In a rural Pehuenche community in southern Chile, COVID-19 containment reactivated dense networks of care while expanding local and state surveillance. Following women’s accounts, I show how “protection” became a hinge through which care was enacted as control and, at times, as racialised violence.

Paper long abstract

This paper places the care–violence nexus at the centre of an account of COVID-19 in Pehuencura, a rural Pehuenche (Mapuche) community in Lonquimay, southern Chile. The paper’s guiding question—how care, surveillance, violence, and protection become entangled in pandemic experience—emerges from a local paradox: “Those who beat us on the other side of the tunnel, now come to care?”

Drawing on repeated phone interviews with three Pehuenche women (conducted fortnightly over two months), complemented by local media tracking and later retrospective conversations, I examine how care was practised through—and sometimes indistinguishable from—technologies of control. Within the community, kinship, neighbourhood and church networks intensified support for elders and families, yet also enabled micro-surveillance (of young people, visitors and outsiders) and a collectively organised sanitary barrier at the community entrance.

Simultaneously, state “care” arrived as emergency cash transfers and food boxes, while external surveillance expanded via police patrols and public-health enforcement.

i trace how violence surfaces not only as an absence of care (historical neglect of services), but through care itself: funerary restrictions that broke communal rites, racialised stigma, and a violent episode in a neigbouring city where “order” and “health” rationales aligned with anti-Mapuche hostility.

By foregrounding women’s situated decisions—who to let in, who to accompany, who to fear—this paper argues for understanding care and violence as co-produced within pandemic governance, rather than as moral opposites.