Latin America as a whole was characterized by the establishment of incomplete welfare states, with significant levels of informal employment and discretionary distribution of public benefits (Gough and Wood, 2004). These factors highlight the weakness or absence of a set of political and economic elements that influence the outcomes of the distributive conflict typical of our societies. The historical socioeconomic consequences that have characterized the region throughout the 20th century have been disastrous, expressed in terms of poverty and inequality, revealing the exclusion of large segments of the population from basic conditions of well-being.

Among the main explanatory causes of this deficient social state in Latin America are: the instability of democratic systems (Garay, 2016), the weakness of collective actors or popular social movements, in addition to the problems of international insertion and the development strategies adopted that tended to hinder the promotion of robust social protection schemes (Ocampo, 2011).

There is some academic consensus that the consolidation of democracy is a precondition for achieving levels of economic redistribution (Huber and Sephens, 2012), insofar as it allows the development of coalitions and left-wing political parties that tend to process the demands of organized wage-earning sectors and seek to modify the predominant pattern of wealth distribution (Korpi, 1985).

It is evident that Latin America as a whole lacked the essential economic and political components for promoting well-being and social integration, and its long tradition of institutional ruptures has become one of the institutional instruments used to resolve distributive conflicts on this continent. Hence, some analysts have characterized the process of emergence and consolidation of its limited public protection schemes as Conservative Modernization (Filgueira, 2013), where the distributed benefits did not alter the established social structure. It is worth noting that this incomplete protection framework presents significant differences among the countries of the region; however, the shared institutional characteristic translates into the lack of protection for large segments of the population. (Mesa Lago 1978; Satyro and Cunha, 2015; Midaglia and Antía, 2017)

In this context of serious socio-economic deficits, which can be described as structural, social, neoliberal reforms were implemented in the 90s, which tended to worsen the social situation in Latin America (Huber and Solt 2004), involving not only groups in poverty but also the lower middle classes, as they suffered the consequences of cuts in public benefits.

However, in the 2000s a different economic and political scenario took shape in Latin America, as the path of growth generated by the commodities boom resumed, with variations depending on the country, until 2009. This economic dynamic was accompanied by relevant political changes, essentially in South America, where left-wing forces assumed national governments, describing this political phenomenon as a "turn to the left" (Arditi, 2009).

In a context of economic development, with steady increases in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) from 2005 to 2009, significant improvements were recorded in poverty and inequality. These improvements can be explained not only by the growth itself but also because the distributional struggle took place within democratic systems (Midaglia and Castillo, 2014). There is no doubt that Latin America, particularly the South, experienced socioeconomic progress during this period that went beyond improvements in traditional social indicators. These advances involved reformulations of public policies in the labor market, including labor re-regulations and increases in the minimum wage, among other measures. In the area of ​​social assistance, there was a promotion of monetary support and various services aimed at households living in poverty. However, other countries, such as Mexico and a large number of Central American nations, did not implement significant changes to their historical social deficits due to a lack of public investment. Nevertheless, during this period, programs such as Conditional Cash Transfers (Valencia 2012; Valencia 2008; Barba 2019) and basic health protection packages were promoted or consolidated, as in the case of Mexico. It is important to highlight that from the beginning of the 21st century to the present, social assistance programs have gained sociopolitical relevance in Latin America, and their importance has been linked to the inclusion of poverty issues on the regional public agenda and the political need to provide public responses to widespread situations of socioeconomic hardship. Added to this is the stabilization of regional democratic regimes, which contribute to the generation of a public debate on the continent's distributive problems, through the activation of social movements and protests, as well as encouraging political parties to care about vulnerable sectors, whether due to ideological choice or simply due to the effect of the electoral dynamic itself (Garay, 2015).

However, the outbreak of the pandemic found Latin American countries with varying levels of social safety nets to confront the health crisis and its social consequences. Undoubtedly, the economic growth of previous years, coupled with social investments in several countries, generated a safety net that, in some cases, allowed for public policies to implement palliative measures. Nevertheless, it is important to note that, across Latin American nations, despite the growth of previous years and the implementation of moderately expansive social reforms, the inadequacy of social safety nets and the lack of protection for significant segments of the population were not reversed.

Available information shows that the pandemic has led to a marked increase in poverty throughout the Americas and a widening of inequalities, as well as greater vulnerability among the poorest social sectors. This is a large-scale crisis with severe consequences for employment and household income, also taking into account the level of informality in our countries.

It is pertinent to pay particular attention to the amplification of multiple socio-economic, cultural, and territorial inequalities, as well as the marked practices of gender and ethnic discrimination that permeate Latin American societies and weaken social cohesion. Undoubtedly, in this region, the strong structural inequalities of the production system are compounded by significant inequities in access to and quality of basic goods and services: health, education, culture, housing, justice, care, personal services, etc., characteristic of an incompetent welfare state that defines this continent, where large sectors of the population are unable to fully exercise their rights.

This global crisis is forcing nation-states to reconfigure their social security and protection systems, moving beyond the prevailing criteria of economic austerity. Perhaps this critical juncture, as some studies indicate, will become an opportunity to rethink existing protection systems and the types of inclusive social policies that should be promoted or stabilized (Martínez Franzoni and Sánchez Ancochea, 2022).

During the long period of neoliberal economic policies, social research focused on investigating the multidimensionality of poverty and inequality and offering methodological tools for their measurement (Yaschine, 2018). Analyses of poverty alleviation programs also proliferated, particularly conditional cash transfer programs implemented in virtually every country in the region in an attempt to control the growth of rural poverty (Midaglia, C., Villarespe, V., Midaglia, C., & Ziccardi, A., 2013). Urban studies pointed out that when these programs were transferred to cities, they lacked effectiveness because asset poverty is prevalent in urban areas, and this dimension was not incorporated into these programs. On the contrary, the region's housing policies departed from their nature as social policies and adopted financial criteria, creating a supply of massive, poor-quality housing located in housing complexes in distant peripheries, generating processes of residential segregation and social segmentation (Ziccardi, A.2012, 2015; Di Virgilio, M., 2021; Fidel and Romero, 2017)

Furthermore, the interdependence between the multiple dimensions of poverty—economic, social, territorial, and cultural—and the amplification of existing inequalities necessitates the construction of new analytical categories to capture the complexity and intersectionality of these phenomena. This complexity unfolds primarily in cities, where encouraging processes related to the exercise of rights and conditions of greater social equity are observed—such as the empowerment of women, the visibility of demands from Indigenous peoples and organizations of people with diverse sexual orientations, and the appropriation of public spaces for culture and recreation by young people and older adults. However, cities also exhibit new dynamics that maintain or exacerbate old inequalities, intertwine with new ones, and become sources of inequality and exclusion: precarious employment, new practices of social exclusion, increased violence, insecurity and the criminal economy, and the fragility of local democracy in neutralizing social polarization (Reygadas and Ziccardi, 2010).

In this context, the unprecedented global crisis created by SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) highlighted other problems and imposed new challenges on the social sciences, adding to the transformations already observed in social and urban issues (Barba, C., Ordoñez, G., & Silva, Y., 2020; Ziccardi, 2020). Undoubtedly, the pandemic demands a renewal of the social research agenda because it is a total social phenomenon (Ramonet, 2020) and universal in its reach, interconnectedness, and visibility (Bringel & Pleyers, 2020), but it is also an urban phenomenon. Ninety percent of infections since the beginning of the pandemic have been concentrated in cities, forcing a change in urban lifestyles. It is evident that the most affected population is that living in low-income neighborhoods, characterized by high population densities, overcrowding, and limited access to services, particularly water (Ziccardi, 2021).

The pandemic made visible to society as a whole not only the shortcomings of healthcare systems but also the profound inequalities that exist in access to public services and the societal vulnerability in which we live, given the interdependence between living, working, and health conditions. It exposed unfulfilled citizens' rights and how social vulnerabilities are exacerbated by a crisis that demands nation-states create conditions for social resilience. It is also a wake-up call regarding the importance of distributive political coalitions, increased social investment, and the creation of care systems (Batthyány, K. 2020). In short, it highlights the need to strengthen the "edge of protection and well-being" (Midaglia, C. and Antía, F., 2017; Martínez Franzoni and Sánchez Ancochea, D., 2022; Martínez Espinoza, M. and Ziccardi, A., 2022).

This complex social situation demands a critical examination of the issue of rights and their interrelationships, from a multidisciplinary perspective, to understand and evaluate the progress achieved and the accumulated social debt, exacerbated by the pandemic. It is necessary to investigate the distribution of public goods, the existence of clientelistic patterns and conditional state benefits, the unmet demands of social groups, and the political alliances that enable or hinder social inclusion policies. This includes examining the institutional architecture that underpins social policies, the economic and human resources they mobilize, bureaucratic inertia, and the weak forms of protection implemented by different levels of government, without effective intergovernmental coordination. In this context, the social action of local government acquires central importance for social research because it is the authority closest to the citizens and the one that must address citizen demands (Cordera, R. and Ziccardi, A. (coord.) 2022).

But what is currently under scrutiny—and the current situation is ripe for initiating a transformation—are the health systems, some of which were dismantled or privatized during the period of neoliberal structural reforms. Left-wing or progressive governments made investments in health, but these were insufficient to reverse the stratification of benefits and the exclusion of large segments of the population from decent healthcare services (Fidel, C. and Valencia, E. (coord.), 2013; Valencia, 2012). Even though the pandemic showed that those with inclusive public policies were better equipped to face it, the region's public health systems as a whole must be investigated in a thorough, systematic, and comparative manner to provide new knowledge and contribute to their restructuring.

It is essential to consider the dynamics of labor markets in relation to pension systems and labor formalization policies in order to design new social protection policies. It is an academic obligation to discuss the various forms of social security coverage for citizens, building social policy strategies to address critical situations. This requires a development model that fosters growth and substantial changes in the course of the post-pandemic economy, as well as the inclusion in the debate by executive and legislative bodies of the creation of a basic income or a minimum living income capable of guaranteeing dignified living conditions for all citizens (Cordera and Provencio, 2020; Yanes, P., 2019; Gaitán, F. and Del Bono, C., 2020). We must also recover and deepen the conceptual tools for analyzing forms of governance and the capacity for influence that different actors possess in order to open spaces for co-production and collaboration to address social demands (Subirats, 2017; Ziccardi, 2018).

Finally, it is crucial to recognize that this global health, economic, and social crisis highlighted the vital role of scientific research conducted at universities and public research centers. In the countries of the region, our institutions, during and after the pandemic, without abandoning their core teaching and research functions, strengthened their outreach to society and some government agencies, reorienting their work agendas and reaffirming their commitment to providing knowledge to overcome the serious situation created, particularly for the most vulnerable sectors of the population (CLACSO Working Group, Poverty and Social Policies).