The Covid19 pandemic seems to imply a inflection in the contemporary history of the relationship between protection and the foundations of state sovereignty, as it mobilizes ongoing trends. It reminds us not only that the strategic fact in the form of nature or culture catastrophes delimits historicity, but also the validity of security as the main function and foundation of the State. If the global nature of the threat demands multilateralism, the response, conditioned by the various political cultures, was in the sense of the idea of self-sovereignty to the nation-state. In Latin America, the pandemic not only reinstated the issue of sovereignty; unlike other regions such as Western Europe, it is also a vector of nationalism that, as always, is polysemic. Its treatment shows both the validity and limits of the national unity epic in the face of the outside threat. The historical tension between the legitimacy given by the "territory" or the "people" to the Nation reappears behind the representations and practices of protection, underlining different projects of society. In the same way as other phenomena of a strategic nature, approaching the pandemic in the plurality of its manifestations requires different spatial scales.