The story of Maricarmen, the 87-year-old Madrid woman evicted by police from the apartment she had lived in since 1956 (she died shortly afterward), drew rare international attention for a housing dispute. Yet the same problem afflicts thousands of older people in Latin America. In Mexico City alone, civil society groups have documented more than 1,200 evictions of older residents over the past five years. Those figures hint at something bigger facing many seniors: the struggle simply to live with dignity.

In this region, the problem is set to grow, because Latin America is aging before it has built sturdy systems of pensions, health, care, housing and social protection. The United Nations (UN) estimates that by 2030 older people will outnumber children under 15. By 2050, according to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), one in four people will be over 60.

Ilan Goldfajn, president of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), wrote that Latin America and the Caribbean are going through “one of the fastest demographic transitions in the history of humanity.” Fertility has fallen to 1.8 children per woman and has sat below the replacement rate of 2.1 for a decade.

Some experts warn that the drift toward predominantly older societies could trigger serious crises in the coming years. If pension, health, care and social-protection systems fail to keep pace, vulnerabilities that now look like isolated episodes, such as Maricarmen’s, could become everyday stories for millions.

Take Honduras. A study published in Economía y Administración, led by Karen Emilce Zapata and a team of experts, projects that the transition there will bring financial strain, more chronic disease, and institutions too thin to meet the needs of an older population.

The Pyramid Flips
In Chile, a forward-looking study by the Centro de Estudios Públicos (a Santiago-based think tank) concludes that population aging will be one of the main sources of structural fiscal pressure. ECLAC calculates that by 2050 people over 80 will make up the largest group, which will triple over the following 30 years.

“Latin America has a problem with the future: it is aging rapidly, but it is not necessarily accumulating sufficient resources to finance that old age,” Funds Society notes in a report. The challenge is not merely counting how many people will be able to work a few decades from now. It also means asking what kind of work they will have, how much they will pay in and what labor conditions will await them.

The upshot: more people will need income in retirement, while proportionally fewer young workers will be around to fund them through traditional pay-as-you-go schemes. Add soaring demand for health services, long-term care and pensions, all of which will fall short. According to ECLAC, 43% of people in the region were already receiving pensions too small to cover their basic needs in 2023.

Longer lives add to the strain, and that is already happening worldwide. This year, for the first time, Japan counted more than 107,000 people aged 100 or older, according to its Health Ministry. In 1963, there were just 153. In Latin America, life expectancy rose from 51.8 years in 1950 to 76.3 in 2025, a gain of 25 years, according to the World Bank (WB).

“The care of the sick and of older people is still not a matter of public policy in most of our countries,” warns Colombian journalist Yolanda Ruiz, who has covered the subject. For decades that burden stayed within families and fell mainly on women. “There is a very large imbalance in the way our societies face old age, which is a stage absolutely rich in possibilities,” she says.

In a paper, Mexican academics María de Lourdes Velasco and Irene Casique describe Latin American states as heirs to a tradition that treated elder care as a “natural” female duty belonging to the home, beyond the reach of public policy. Yet that family-centered model is cracking too, as more women have entered the workforce.

The Changing Family
That is only one factor. In some countries, such as Chile, people are increasingly living alone: single-person households go from 8.3% in 1992 to 21.8% in 2024, according to the latest census. Meanwhile, a sizable share of workers will hold informal jobs, pay into social security only intermittently, or stay outside health systems altogether.

And there’s more. Fernando Rada Schultze, an aging researcher at Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), asks, given the current economic climate in some countries, “who cares for whom?” He raises the point because in some multigenerational households, older people’s pensions keep the family afloat. “If the fixed income that households have is that of the older person, I would start to debate a little bit who carries the responsibility.”

The demographic shift also poses a cultural question, among others: what does it mean to be an older adult? Seniors have long faced discrimination and been cast as a burden on the rest of society, an image that hardly fits the new generations reaching old age. “We have to change that image,” insists Mónica Roque, president of the Latin American Association of Community Gerontology. “We have to combat ageism and those negative stereotypes.”

Ruiz co-hosts the podcast Las menopáusicas with María Elvira Samper. Among other aims, the show sets out to reclaim a word that has become an insult and to challenge how this stage of life is portrayed. Both hosts are older adults, and in their interviews they have met women who, past 70, launch ventures, divorce, fall in love again, change their lives or careers and, in short, remain highly productive.

Population aging, then, should be seen not only through the lens of human rights but also through “the valuable contributions that we older people make to the common good, to society and to the economy,” Roque says. “Because that human capital we have is precisely what allows societies to grow in a much richer way, taking into account all our experience and wisdom.”

For more than a decade, international bodies, some governments and civil society groups have sought ways to confront this scenario. In 2015, the Organization of American States (OAS) adopted the Inter-American Convention on Protecting the Human Rights of Older Persons, aimed at contributing to their “full inclusion, integration and participation in society.”

Roque says countries such as Uruguay, Chile, Brazil and Argentina pushed hard for the convention. In Argentina, however, ground was lost once Javier Milei took office. “This current government discriminates against older people. And not only that, it does violence to them,” she charges.

Some States Look Away
She knows the history well: from 2003 to 2015 she headed Argentina’s delegation to the UN and the OAS on the human rights of older people. Those years, she recalls, were “an era of glory for progressive governments, with Lula da Silva in Brazil, Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Michelle Bachelet in Chile and José Mujica in Uruguay.”

Although the convention obliges states to guarantee older people’s dignity, autonomy and comprehensive care, 21 member countries have yet to ratify it. Venezuela is one of them. Marino Alvarado, legal enforceability coordinator at Provea (a Venezuelan human rights organization), writes in an article that the omission compounds the uncertainty of thousands of people already coping with a collapsed public health system and household incomes that cannot cover the consumer basket of goods.

Roque, for her part, holds out little hope for progress in countries such as Nicaragua, El Salvador or Honduras, where overall poverty exceeds 60%. Those governments, she says, “have devoted very little to the issue of older people, and that is why they never ratified the convention.”

Care as a Right
Some countries are working on solutions. This year Mexico City passed a law that seeks to decommodify, defamilialize and defeminize care, while guaranteeing free, universal access to it. Under the law, the state shoulders responsibilities, but the model also enlists society and private business.

Human Rights Watch, however, argues that the law will only work if it clears the financial hurdle. “Without adequate funding, the system cannot move from the formal recognition of rights to guaranteeing real support in people’s daily lives,” Carlos Ríos Espinosa, the group’s associate director for disability rights, wrote in a bulletin.

Roque adds that countries should also revisit labor policies that have left family finances more precarious. “They are extremely worried because the fertility rate is low, because there will be no one to work and, therefore, no one to contribute. And how worried are they about the jobs that AI is taking away? Why don’t we worry more about that?” she says.

Rada Schultze notes that nearly every country in the region is indeed seeing fewer and fewer births. “By 2050, populations will no longer grow.” Yet he does not share the doom-laden view of that future. “I see no need to be alarmed about it, although there is a need to take action.”

On October 1 in Paraguay, the international forum Cuidar con Dignidad es Envejecer con Derechos (Caring with Dignity Is Aging with Rights), held with support from the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), championed older people as individuals with autonomy, abilities and valuable contributions to their families, communities and societies. Participants stressed that healthy aging must be built from the earliest years of life.

The great challenge for Latin American countries, as Roque puts it, is for people to reach old age “with the best possible health.” That will only be realistic if governments implement effective policies that improve quality of life at every stage.

The real question, then, is whether countries can lay the groundwork now: first, by accepting that growing old is simply one more stage of life; then, by designing systems that keep people from arriving there exposed to precarity, dependency or abandonment on a massive scale.

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