This article summarizes the main results of the thesis of the same name, in which we studied how the Chilean government defined poverty as a social problem and the poor as a subject of government between 1990 and 2010. The strategy used for the investigation was Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 1989; van Dijk & Mendizabal 1999), which was applied to analyse a corpus consisting of messages issued by governments from the Coalition of Parties for Democracy on May, 21st. It is concluded that the discourse about the confrontation of poverty establishes a social identity of the poor as a principle of social inclusion, setting this as a basic criterion for the benefit of social policies, considering poverty as a problem that belongs mainly to the poor and the social intervention as necessary due to the inability of poor people to overcome their condition by themselves.