Foreword Four decades of privatization of pension systems in Latin America also trans­late into four decades of an ongoing debate on whether the well-being of a better society can be promoted through the market, based on competition and profit concepts, or rather than through a social welfare state committed to the social security and justice objectives, implicitly involving the notion of solidarity to ensure the participation of all citizens in the development of political and social life. In this regard, the market is irrelevant, provided that we understand that well-being can only be the sum of individual efforts, but not a task of society as such. A pension system is a significant part of social security and it guarantees the survival of a growing portion of the population that is no longer economically active. As in the case of health, education, and other basic services, there is an endless dispute about whether these services are public or commodities. The Covid-19 pandemic has shown that robust public health systems offer better responsiveness than under-funded systems with a strong presence of restricted-coverage private bidders/providers. This actually applies more in Latin American countries, where at least half of the population works in the informal sector—most of them not being able to finance their social protection. These countries have already experienced 40 years with privatized pension systems. A sufficient period of time to be able to evaluate the great prom ­ises made when structural pensions reforms were introduced replacing public pay-as-you-go(PAYG) systems, many times in crisis. Evidence is not optimis­tic, at least not from the perspective of most of the private system“clients”. Clearly, the introduction of private systems has defined winners and losers. Discontent is growing; therefore, several countries conducted re-reforms or are discussing them, aimed at cushioning the effects of the logic of their opera ­tion in an environment of social segregation based on the labor market and on 12