This article deals with the attacks to human rights and to social policies, in spite of their discursive power contemporarily. Such attacks were stressed by the end of the bipolarity between the United States (USA) and the ex-Soviet Union (USSR) at the end of the 1980's, by the USSR's self-dissolution in 1991, and by the transformation of the USA into a world superpower. However, when the USA became target of terrorist attacks, supposedly committed by poor countries, poverty was criminalized and became enemy number one. That fact explains the disassembling of the human rights, mainly the social ones, and of the public policies which aim at implementing them.
Social policy; Human rights; Imperialism; Criminalization of poverty
