The year 2020 will pass to history because a big part of the world population was confined. It will become the pandemic year, the year of the virus originated in China that rapidly propagated through most countries. In December and January, it was perceived as a distant problem, but in February it was already afflicting Europe and in March America. It is perceived as a democratic virus, given that anyone could have been infected, but reality shows us that it is a classist and racist virus. At the momento that ^{Johns Hopkins University & Medicine (2020)} wrote this, only one out of the ten countries with the highest death rate for every one hundred thousand inhabitants belongs to the first world (United States) and six are Latin-American (Mexico, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia and Brasil).

Latin American governments impose confinements and mandatory social distancing in societies marked by misery and informality. While some wait for the peak of the pandemic to pass in the comfort of their homes, others don’t have any other option than putting themselves in danger of infection and go out in search of theirs and their families livelihood (^{Fernández-Sánchez, Gómez-Calles y Pérez Pérez, 2020}). Poverty and inequality lead those who have to endure them to be more vulnerable to disease. In our region, the poor, indigenous and black communities, marginalized and discriminated for so long, are victimized now again since the infection and death index are higher than in other communities (^{Santos Ferreira, 2020}).

COVID-19 is not the cause of our misfortunes, it has just made them visible. As it was said in the previous editorial, poverty in America is on the rise since long ago, even before the pandemic (^{Mendieta, 2020a}). Our neo-liberal economic model, built from individualism and marked by ambition and selfishness is showing itself as inefficient for enduring a global crisis.

Great debates, such as universal basic income, are being avoided. But protected under exceptional powers, our governments are rescuing banks, airlines and economic groups, while dismissing small companies and informal jobs. In the middle of the crisis or hidden behind it, labour, pension and tax reforms are being made, in some cases behind the back of congresses but others with their complicity. Corruption is taking advantage of this weakness in controls in times of pandemic to appropriate public resources.

Latin-America has been a laboratory for neoliberal policies. For a long time, the growth of States has been measured according to the gross domestic product (GDP). But is a State that produces more good and services a more fair and equalitarian one? The answer is no. In the Colombian case, the GDP tripled in the last thirty years (^{Cepal, 2020}), while the Gini index locates us as one of the most unequal countries in the world (^{Banco Mundial, 2020}).

What our rulers did during the pandemic was limiting fundamental rights as the freedom of movement, reunion, cult, protest, among others. In many cases, they ruled exceptional laws and in the Colombian case, they took ordinary measures under the National Code of Police (^{Mendieta y Tobón, 2020b}). We are living in times of proliferation of exception states and the great danger we go through is that the exception becomes the norm and the abnormal a tense normality.

The virus has shown us the inability of populist leaders to face the crises that are not a product of their demagogy, but it has also made us think about the type of leadership necessary to overcome those crises. On that depends the survival of humanity. How will society be in a close future? Will they have more public resources investment in health, education, science and technology or will they be more fearful, surveilled and controlled? We can not forget that the Great Depression put Roosevelt on the world stage, but it also put Hitler.

We now face the worst sanitary and economic crisis of the last one hundred years and we need to learn amid difficulty. We have made several errors with the privatization of healthcare and education, and with the decrease in public investment in science and technology. We made a mistake by taking down and de facto de Social Rule of Law. Our peoples are now obliged to decide our fate: Democracy or populism? Neoliberalism or social democracy? Continuity or change? Our efforts may be directed towards better societies, fairer, pluralist and with opportunities. If that is not the case, we will not be ready to face new viruses and we will be doomed to endure more problems. Thus, there will not be new opportunities, given that it will be the end of humanity.

Despite these harsh times, we can not overlook that Opinión Jurídica is now 20 years old. What started as a students and teachers project of the Faculty of Law of the University of Medellín is now a scientific broadcast medium that belongs now to knowledge itself. During these two decades, the journal has achieved positioning itself among the researchers from Colombia and Latin America and being a médium for sharing their advancements and finished works.

In this 39th issue, we are pleased to present 13 articles from four different Iberoamerican countries: four articles from Brazil, four from Chile, four from Colombia and one from Spain. These articles approach different areas on law and other related disciplines such as constitutional, family, public international, civil and criminal law; judicial sociology and public policy, among others. Amid adversity, we are still in compliance with our authors, researchers and readers. Our purpose is to provide science for the construction of better societies.