Health and equity in Latin America: utopias and reality

Curitiba's Declaration during the 22nd World Conference on Health Promotion of the IUHPE highlighted equity as a prerequisite for health and as an essential element of health promotion, though not as an isolated aim. Latin America today is facing the loss of civil rights, austerity policies and social inequities, which together are increasing the gap between rich and poor and putting the health sector on alert. As health professionals, it is therefore our responsibility to provide cross-cutting analyses on how inter-sectoral public policies might represent utopias and realities in such a dramatic period of our history. This article not only represents the implementation of brutal neoliberalism policies in Brazil, but also an opportunity to focus on utopias and realities re-emerging from the layers of social and community-based territorial movements. We aim to demonstrate how the attempts of political deconstruction of the Brazilian Unified Health System (SUS) might as well be confronted with strategic perspectives of working from the bottom up, to reorganize the health reform which led to its implementation. We use utopias and realities to illustrate how territorial networks might be used as tools of empowerment, along with constant flow of dialogues with the academic sector. Theoretical contributions of social sciences and critical epidemiology pinpoint that concepts of interculturality and emancipation might help Latin America overcome health inequities, whereas the social reconstruction of democracy occurs as both a reality and utopia within the public sector.