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The article analyses how social protection systems in Latina America have responded to the serious social situation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Guided by an exploratory study, the paper focuses on the experiences of Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. The analysis considers that the responses produced by the three cases results from the intersection between the institutional structure’s previous legacy of the social protection systems existing in each country, the political orientation of the governments in exercise and the social and political dynamics in the sanitary crisis context. It seems that, despite protective measures of greater or lesser scope and magnitude, which either reinforce the existing social protections or introduce new mechanisms – all of them temporary – the social crisis specific to Latin American social formations has worsened in the countries studied.