Short answers, pulled from the story.
Latin America is the cultural region of the Americas where Romance languages, primarily Spanish and Portuguese, are predominantly spoken. It is defined by cultural identity rather than geography, so it includes Mexico in North America while often excluding English-speaking countries like Guyana and Jamaica.
The Chilean politician Francisco Bilbao first combined the words Latin and America in print in 1856, at a Paris conference titled Initiative of the America. The idea for a Federal Congress of Republics. The Colombian writer Jose Maria Torres Caicedo used it the following year in his poem The Two Americas.
The term Latin America had an anti-imperial genesis. Francisco Bilbao and Jose Maria Torres Caicedo used it to call for political and economic union among the region's countries to defend their territories against foreign interventions, especially expansion by the United States.
The most common definition includes countries and territories where people speak Spanish or Portuguese and Roman Catholicism dominates, making it synonymous with Ibero-America. This covers Mexico, most of Central and South America, and Caribbean nations such as Cuba and the Dominican Republic, while excluding Belize, Guyana, and Suriname.
According to the United Nations ECLAC, Latin America is the most unequal region in the world, with roots in the colonial Casta system, a racially based hierarchy that constrained social mobility for the poorest. Differences in opportunity tend to fall along lines of race, ethnicity, rurality, and gender, and poverty has been transmitted across generations.
Brazil is the world's largest producer of sugarcane, soy, coffee, and oranges, and the largest exporter of chicken meat. Mexico is the world's largest producer of silver, Chile supplies about a third of the world's copper, Peru leads in quinoa, and Colombia is the world's largest producer of emeralds.