Not evading reality, no, but seeking to confront it, betting on building institutions for collective well-being when the world showed that mass destruction was a plausible option. Eighty-three years later, the parallelism is difficult to ignore. Since October 7, 2023, more than seventy thousand Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, amid an offensive that multiple international organizations have qualified as serious violations of international humanitarian law. In September 2025, the UN's Independent International Commission of Inquiry confirmed the genocide classification after an exhaustive investigation. In concentration camps, systematic extermination advanced without restraint. And at that very moment, a group of social security officials and technicians decided to meet to talk about pensions, health, and social protection. Uruguay turned care into public policy. Its current weakness is not an argument for its dissolution, but a signal of the urgency to strengthen them. In the Americas, challenges are rarely isolated. Argentina laid the foundations for public health as a right in the 40s; Colombia developed retirement savings mechanisms with state support. They are reminders that regional cooperation is a concrete tool to face common crises. Latin America knows darkness well: economic crises, weakened protection systems, and persistent inequalities. In the darkest historical moments, peoples have made their most luminous decisions. Between September 10 and 16, 1942, twenty-one American countries met in Santiago, Chile, to found the Inter-American Conference on Social Security. And when problems are shared, responses must also be shared. Recent history confirms this. But it also knows reconstruction. If they failed to prevent these crises, what is their meaning? But that reading inverts causality. Cooperation institutions are not born when the world is calm. It knows that institutions are not born from inertia, but from conscious decisions. Dawn does not arrive alone, nor by inertia; it is built by those who refuse to accept that darkness is the last word. To speak today of social security, pensions, or public health in a world torn by war is not naive. What the CISS has done for more than eight decades is to weave and sustain that collective: articulating learnings, sharing what works, and building collective capabilities. In that sense, spaces like the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), to which I had the honor of attending representing the CISS, are an active response to the collapse. At the same time, multilateralism faces one of its most fragile moments: questioned institutions, weakened agreements, and powers that move away from the spaces they once helped build. Faced with that context, the temptation to ask what these institutions are for is understandable. It is, in reality, a form of resistance. They arise precisely to prevent violence, abandonment, or inequality from becoming destiny. It is to do the same as those who met in Santiago in 1942: to bet on life when everything seems to be leaning towards the opposite. Labor informality, population aging, or the increase in chronic diseases are shared realities from Tijuana to Tierra del Fuego. In the Pacific, allies faced each other at Guadalcanal. The Israeli army has destroyed 38 hospitals, 96 health centers, and has forcibly displaced two million Gazans. In Ukraine, the war has been prolonged for years. Meanwhile, thousands of kilometers away, the world was crumbling. It was the German assault on Stalingrad: the bloodiest battle in human history, with estimated casualties of nearly two million people between soldiers and civilians.
