This paper analyzes the course of the adjustment and social reform processes impelled by international financial institutions and numerous governments in Latin America, especially in the nineties. It presents the characteristics of the welfare paradigm that achieved hegemony in a regional scale and discusses the consequences of applying the same recipes to very diverse national realities. To analyze the regional heterogeneity, it falls back upon the concept of "welfare system" and uses a typology that shows the differential effects of the processes approached here. The paper points the need of the use of a different welfare paradigm to face the deep social challenges put to the countries of the area, in other words, it marks the urgency of a reform of the reform.
welfare system; poverty; social policies; social transition; Latin America