Defense of Rights, Critical Training, and Ethical-Political Project: Latin American Social Work Facing the Neoliberal Offensive and Social Precarity

1. Introduction

Latin America and the Caribbean are experiencing a worsening of their structural contradictions, marked by a renewed and aggressive neoliberal offensive. This model of accumulation by dispossession has transcended mere economic restructuring to establish itself as a hegemonic rationality that systematically dismantles the region's nascent social protection networks (Iamamoto, 2003). The direct consequence of this state reconfiguration is the structural precarization of life, which manifests not only in labor flexibility and multidimensional poverty, but in the commodification of fundamental social rights. In this scenario, social policies have been reduced to targeted, managerial, and palliative mechanisms designed to contain social conflict rather than resolve underlying inequalities (Netto, 2021).

Faced with this offensive, Latin American Social Work finds itself at a historical and institutional crossroads. On one hand, state and private institutions pressure professionals to assume a technocratic role focused on managing scarcity and containing risk. On the other hand, the discipline possesses a robust historical body of knowledge derived from the Reconceptualization Movement, which crystallizes today in the ethical-political project (Montaño, 2020). This project transcends the illusory neutrality of conservatism and positions Social Work as a political actor committed to the unrestricted defense of human rights, the emancipation of subalternized subjects, and the construction of a radically democratic society.

Sustaining this ethical-political direction requires grounded praxis and rigorous academic training. Decoloniality of knowledge and critical sentipensar (feeling-thinking) emerge as indispensable epistemological tools to resist the imposition of Eurocentric and neoliberal intervention models that pathologize poverty (Bermúdez et al., 2025). Academia becomes a contested territory where critical training must equip future professionals with the analytical categories needed to decode macro-structural reality and act within the microphysics of community and institutional intervention.

Given the tension between the demands of a precaritizing market and the ethical commitment of the profession, this article poses the following research question: How does Latin American Social Work articulate its ethical-political project and critical training to confront the structural precarization derived from the neoliberal offensive?

To address this question, the present study establishes three central objectives: 1) Analyze the impact of neoliberalism on the current configuration of social policies and labor conditions in the region; 2) Examine the epistemological and pedagogical challenges in critical university training; and 3) Identify strategies of resistance, decoloniality, and defense of rights that emerge from situated professional practice.

2. Methodology

To answer the research question through a rigorous and situated approach, a qualitative Systematic Literature Review (SLR) was conducted. The design was guided by the parameters of the PRISMA statement (Page et al., 2021). In coherence with the study's decolonial epistemological framework, the treatment of the literature adopted a critical-hermeneutic perspective to analyze the emancipatory discourses, tensions, and proposals present in regional scientific production.

The collection of the documentary corpus was carried out using the Scopus database. A Boolean search equation was constructed that articulated four conceptual blocks: discipline, structural context, ethical-political stance, and geopolitical delimitation (Latin America and the Global South). Peer-reviewed original and review articles published between 2016 and 2026 that explicitly addressed precarization, community resistance, or decoloniality were included. Studies situated exclusively in the Global North without a theoretical framework transferable to the South, as well as purely clinical research lacking structural analysis, were excluded.

The search yielded an initial total of N=145 records. During the title and abstract screening, n=85 documents were removed due to thematic deviation. In the full-text eligibility phase (N=60), n=50 works were excluded for not delving into the ethical-political dimension. Finally, a definitive corpus of N=10 articles was consolidated. The analysis of these texts was conducted using reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2021), allowing the results to be structured into three fundamental axes.

3. Results

3.1. Impact of Neoliberalism on Social Policies and Labor Precarization

The reviewed literature agrees that neoliberal rationality has transformed social policies into instruments of targeted containment, simultaneously precaritizing the lives of intervention subjects and the working conditions of professionals.

In the Southern Cone, the promotion of care cooperatives as an alternative to unemployment clashes with structural barriers. Miranda Sánchez et al. (2023) show that, in the absence of robust state support, these initiatives reproduce labor precarization and gender gaps, straying from the horizon of "decent work." Likewise, in the realm of justice, resocialization policies in women's prisons across Latin America prove to be deeply deficient. Villamar Romero et al. (2024) point out that these programs lack a gender perspective and function more as punitive mechanisms than as mechanisms for social reintegration.

Precarization also manifests in professional integration. In Brazil, the implementation of Social Work within the state school system faces severe institutional barriers stemming from legislation that lacks enforcement mechanisms and a clear authority to supervise it (da Luz Scherf, 2023). Policies are approved on paper but fail to specify funding sources, forcing professionals to operate under conditions of extreme resource constraint.

3.2. Epistemological and Pedagogical Challenges in Critical Training

Faced with the technocratic co-optation of the profession, studies emphasize the urgency of decolonizing academic training and reconstructing Social Work's interpretative frameworks.

Reyes-Barría (2025) warns of the need to exercise a radical critique of academic ideologies that have historically oppressed the development of clinical Social Work in Latin America. Training must overcome the binary between direct intervention and political action, recognizing that individual suffering is intrinsically linked to structural violence. To achieve this, centering subalternized voices is imperative. Bermúdez et al. (2025) propose sentipensar and "third-order" thinking as epistemological stances that allow researchers to respond to sociopolitical contexts, breaking away from the methodological asepsis of the Global North.

3.3. Strategies of Resistance, Decoloniality, and Defense of Rights

Despite institutional encirclement, Social Work and communities deploy resistance tactics that revitalize the ethical-political project from the ground up.

During acute crises, social workers act as "street-level bureaucrats" who subvert exclusionary regulations. Peris Cancio and Monteiro Mustafá (2024), in their international comparison of social workers during the pandemic, document how professionals in the Latin American cases studied—Argentina and Brazil—used high levels of discretion to protect vulnerable populations. In parallel, when the State exercises administrative violence, communities generate their own welfare systems. Pérez-Brumer et al. (2024) illustrate how trans women in Peru articulated mutual aid networks to guarantee food and housing in the face of exclusionary policies.

In Wallmapu (Chile), resistance assumes an ontological character. Maher and Loncopán (2024) describe the "repoliticization of spirituality" as an act of defense against corporate extractivism. Huenchucoy Millao and MacAdoo Espinoza (2025) highlight how Mapuche social workers use rakizuam (ancestral reflexivity) to decolonize their subjectivities within state institutions. Finally, methodological innovation is also a form of resistance; Valiquette and Su (2024) demonstrate the use of Photovoice with LGBTQ+ refugees in Brazil, enabling these populations to make their realities visible and democratize the demand for their rights.

4. Discussion and Conclusions

The analysis of the documentary corpus confirms that the neoliberal offensive in Latin America operates not solely through budget cuts, but through a reconfiguration of state rationality. As contemporary critical theory warns (Iamamoto, 2003; Netto, 2021), the neoliberal State delegates social reproduction to the market and to precarious informal networks. Studies by Miranda Sánchez et al. (2023) and Villamar Romero et al. (2024) illustrate how professionals are inserted into institutions that demand the resolution of structural problems without providing the necessary material conditions, trapping Social Work in a "precarization trap."

Faced with this instrumentalization, the coloniality of knowledge (Quijano, 2000) has historically imposed Eurocentric intervention frameworks. However, the emergence of analytical categories such as sentipensar (Bermúdez et al., 2025) and rakizuam (Huenchucoy Millao & MacAdoo Espinoza, 2025) demonstrates that decoloniality is a methodological requirement for practice, allowing the clinical dimension of suffering to reconnect with its macro-structural determinants (Reyes-Barría, 2025).

Resistance transcends the discursive level. "Bureaucratic discretion" (Peris Cancio & Monteiro Mustafá, 2024) demonstrates that the ethical-political project survives in the microphysics of institutional power. This praxis, combined with community self-management (Pérez-Brumer et al., 2024; Maher & Loncopán, 2024), reaffirms that defending human rights in the Global South requires overflowing institutional limits and organically linking with social movements.

Latin American Social Work currently faces one of the most aggressive stages of capitalist accumulation by dispossession. Nevertheless, this systematic review demonstrates that the ethical-political project maintains deep tactical and theoretical vitality. Its survival depends on three inescapable imperatives: assuming an unrestricted commitment to the decoloniality of the curriculum, politicizing workplace dissatisfaction by recognizing that professional precarization is inseparable from the precarization of the working classes, and transcending the state framework to strengthen mutual aid networks. The defense of human rights requires critical training that does not fear confronting the structural roots of inequality.

5. References

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