Saludo Global. El escenario actual y perspectivas a futuro

17 First Prologue 1 Ronald Labonté 2 After twenty years of working as a community health promoter, first in Canada and then internationally, I bumped into what became known as ‘globalization’. In country aftercountry, I heard public health practitioners complain of pro- gram cutbacks, staff retrenchment, and a retreat from the idealism of the 1986 Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion ( WHO , 1986).The year was 1994. I reasoned that the ubiquity of these complaints suggested that there must be something above the level of nations getting in the way of an empowering public health practice. In 1995 the World Trade Organization came into existence and my attention made a sudden shift from catalyzing community level health activism to understanding how a globalizing political economy was constraining our generation’s ‘health for all’ optimism. My emergent knowledge would have been laughable to many people living in Africa and Latin America, the early global regions to be adversely affectedbywhatwenowshort- handas‘neoliberalism’, amarket-fundamentalist capitalism on ideological steroids. Chile was one of neoliberalism’s earliest policy laboratories, following the violent overthrow of the social medicine and social democracy of the Allende government. Today, with its efforts to create a new human-rights focused constitution that addresses our ever more urgent health crises of inequalities, climate change, and xenophobic exclusions, Chile is again witness to the political struggles between progressive and reactionary populism that have become a defining feature throughout Latin America and many other regions of the world. These ‘struggles for health’, as the sorely missed late Prof. David Sanders liked to remind us, are the ‘struggle for a more equitable, just, and caring world’ (Sanders, 2020). The Covid-19 pandemic (subdued but still with us) highlighted the in- creasing fragility of our entwined sociopolitical and ecological systems upon which our health depends, and the pressing need for a volte face from many of the tacit and unjust imperatives of our global economy. As one example, this new collection notes, the incursion of private capital and publicly funded 1 Nota del Editor: Dada la relevancia de este prólogo en inglés, idioma nativo de su autor, se mantiene como tal, y a continuación se ofrece su traducción al español realizada por nuestro equipo. 2 BA MA Ph.D. Professor Emeritus. Ronald Labonté is Distinguished Research Chair in Glo- balization and Health Equity and Professor in the School of Public Health and Epidemiology, University of Ottawa. He has enjoyed a 45-year career in publichealth spanning government positions, international consultancies, and universities. For the past 25 yearshis research has focused on the health equity impacts of diverse globalization processes. He is Editor-in- Chief of the BMC journal, Globalization and Health, active with the People’s Health Movement, a frequent contributor to its flagship publication Global Health Watch.