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— CH. 1 · INTRODUCTION —

Latin America

~10 min read · Ch. 1 of 8
8 sections
  • Latin America is not a place you can find on a map by drawing borders. It is defined by language and culture, not geography. Mexico, in North America, counts as part of it. Jamaica, Guyana, and Suriname, sitting in the same hemisphere, usually do not. The dividing line is the language people speak. Spanish and Portuguese pull a country in. English and Dutch tend to leave it out.

    The name itself was born in argument, not agreement. It first appeared in print in 1856, at a conference in Paris with the unwieldy title Initiative of the America. The idea for a Federal Congress of Republics. A Chilean politician named Francisco Bilbao put the two words together. He was not celebrating a shared heritage. He was sounding an alarm.

    Who gets to belong to this region, and who decides? Why does a single term carry the weight of empire, slavery, revolution, and the most unequal distribution of wealth on Earth? And how did a phrase coined in protest end up describing a region that produces the world's quinoa, its largest cattle herds, and a third of its copper? The answers begin with a word and a quarrel over what it was meant to defend.

  • Francisco Bilbao delivered his speech in France in June 1856, joining Central Americans and South Americans who were protesting United States expansion into the Southern Hemisphere. The historian Michel Gobat describes the term's origins as anti-imperial. The men who created it were not friends of empire, anywhere on the globe.

    Jose Maria Torres Caicedo, a Colombian diplomat and intellectual living in France, used the term the following year. The historian Arturo Ardao traced it to Torres Caicedo's poem, published on the 15th of February 1857 in a French-based Spanish-language newspaper. The poem was titled The Two Americas. Both Bilbao and Torres Caicedo wanted the political and economic union of all Latin American countries. They argued that unity was the only way to defend their territories against foreign intervention.

    The French Saint-Simonian Michel Chevalier had laid intellectual groundwork in the 1830s. He claimed part of the Americas was inhabited by people of a Latin race, who could ally with Latin Europe against Anglo-Saxon America. The same racial framing that justified solidarity would later justify conquest. Under Napoleon III in the 1860s, France used the idea to justify its intervention in the Second Mexican Empire.

    Bilbao saw the irony and named it. During the French invasion of Mexico, he wrote a work called Emancipation of the Spirit in the Americas. He called France hypocritical, saying she calls herself protector of the Latin race just to subject it to her exploitation regime. He asked Latin American intellectuals to seek their intellectual emancipation by abandoning all French ideas.

  • Bilbao himself excluded Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay from his early idea of Latin America. The definition has never stopped shifting. The Chilean historian Jaime Eyzaguirre attacked the term for diluting the Spanish character of the region by including nations he believed did not share the same pattern of conquest and colonization.

    The most common definition today covers countries where people speak Spanish or Portuguese and where Roman Catholicism dominates, making it a synonym for Ibero-America. Puerto Rico, the Spanish-speaking Caribbean territory the United States acquired after the 1898 Spanish-American War, is usually included. This definition leaves out Belize, Guyana, and Suriname, along with several French overseas departments.

    A looser definition admits any Romance language, including French, which brings in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti. A broader one still treats the whole of the Americas south of the United States as Latin America, emphasizing a shared history of colonialism rather than culture. The United Nations sometimes sidesteps the debate entirely with the phrase Latin America and the Caribbean. The historian Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo offered a blunt verdict, saying the idea of Latin America ought to have vanished with the obsolescence of racial theory.

    Long before any of these arguments, in 1492, Antonio de Nebrija published the Gramatica de la lengua castellana. It was the first grammar of a modern European language ever printed. The language at the center of every later dispute had its rules written down the same year Columbus crossed the Atlantic.

  • Before Europeans arrived in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, the region held advanced civilizations including the Olmec, the Maya, the Muisca, the Aztecs, and the Inca. Spain and Portugal seized control, established colonies, and imposed Roman Catholicism and their languages. They brought African slaves to work the land, exploiting large settled societies and their resources.

    The Spanish Crown allowed only Christians to travel to the New World. Colonization brought sharp declines in the native population through disease, forced labor, and violence. Native codices and artwork were destroyed. Religious purity was enforced, and perceived deviations like witchcraft were aggressively prosecuted.

    Catholicism had been central to the Reconquista, the Catholic reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula from Muslim rule. As a result, the Church effectively became another arm of the Spanish government. The crown held sweeping powers over church affairs in its overseas territories, and prelates often acted as government officials.

    Under Philip II, royal power over the colonies grew, yet the crown knew little about its own possessions. The Council of the Indies oversaw the territories without advice from officials who had direct colonial experience. The crown did not even know which Spanish laws were in force there. This was a period the source calls the Spanish Golden Age, conventionally beginning in 1492. It produced Miguel de Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and the painter Diego Velazquez, and it ended, in cultural terms, with the death of Pedro Calderon de la Barca in 1681.

  • In the early nineteenth century nearly all of Spanish America won independence by armed struggle. Cuba and Puerto Rico were the exceptions. Brazil took a different road, becoming a monarchy separate from Portugal before turning into a republic late in the same century.

    Political freedom from European monarchies did not end black slavery in the new nations. Independence brought political and economic instability instead. As regional caudillos gained power, nation-builders began to see themselves as more modern than their former colonizers. Leaders shifted away from aristocracy toward republicanism and democracy, giving a voice to citizens beyond the Creole elites. Even illiterate people would gather in their communities to debate political ideals.

    Great Britain and the United States filled the vacuum that European monarchies left behind. The result was a form of neo-colonialism, where political sovereignty stayed in place but foreign powers held real economic power. The twentieth century brought U.S. intervention and the Cold War, with revolutions in countries like Cuba shaping regional politics.

    The early 2000s saw the Pink tide, a wave of left-wing governments. It included Hugo Chavez in Venezuela from 1999 to 2013, Evo Morales in Bolivia, and Lula da Silva in Brazil. Then came a conservative wave. In Mexico, the National Action Party's Vicente Fox won the 2000 election, ending the 71-year rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party. The cycle would later swing back toward the left again.

  • Latin America is, according to the United Nations ECLAC, the most unequal region in the world. In 2025 The Economist said its tax and welfare systems are shockingly bad at reducing inequality. Strong economic growth and improved social indicators have not solved the problem.

    The roots run back to the colonial Casta system, a racially based hierarchy that has proven difficult to eradicate. Differences in initial endowments and opportunities have constrained the poorest's social mobility, turning poverty into something passed from generation to generation. Differences tend to fall along lines of race, ethnicity, rurality, and gender. Because inequality in gender and location is nearly universal, race and ethnicity play the larger role in discrimination.

    The pattern was imported from a deeply unequal Spain. In 17th century Habsburg Spain, the nobility was exempt from taxes and considered work undignified. By 1660 there were about 200,000 Spaniards in the clergy, and the Church owned 20% of all the land in Spain.

    Education tells part of the story. During the first phase of globalization, educational inequality rose, peaking around the end of the 19th century. Latin America then had the highest level of educational inequality of any developing region. A 2013 UN report, Inequality Matters, tied falling wage shares to labor-saving technology and weakened labor regulation, changes that hit those at the middle and bottom hardest.

  • Brazil is the world's largest producer of sugarcane, soy, coffee, oranges, guarana, acai, and Brazil nut. In 2019 it was the world's largest exporter of chicken meat, shipping 3.77 million tons, and it held the second largest cattle herd on the planet at 22.2% of the world total. Peru, meanwhile, is the world's largest producer of quinoa, and Costa Rica is the world's largest producer of pineapples.

    Mexico leads the world in avocados and, more strikingly, in silver. In 2019 it produced more than 200 million ounces, almost 23% of world production. Chile contributes about a third of the world's copper, and in 2019 it was also the largest producer of iodine and rhenium. Colombia is the world's largest producer of emeralds, and the main producer of coca, the plant at the heart of cocaine.

    Mining anchors entire economies, especially in Chile, Peru, and Bolivia. Brazil holds 98% of known world reserves of niobium. The region's oil tells a darker story. Venezuela, once a giant at about 2.5 million barrels a day in 2015, collapsed to 877 thousand by 2019, and at one point reached only 300,000, undone by a lack of investment.

    Energy is where Latin America surprises. As of 2023 the region and the Caribbean generated 60% of its electricity from renewable sources, double the global average of 30%. Brazil co-owns the Itaipu Dam with Paraguay on the Parana River, with an installed capacity of 14 gigawatts across 20 units of 700 megawatts each. For several years it was the largest hydroelectric plant in the world, until the Three Gorges Dam in China overtook it.

  • Brazil has more than 1.7 million kilometers of roads and the second largest number of airports in the world, behind only the United States. Its rivers carry the rest. The Hidrovia Solimoes-Amazonas runs from Tabatinga to Manaus and on to Belem, moving almost all passenger transport from the Amazon plain and nearly all cargo bound for those regional centers.

    Mexico draws the crowds. It is the only Latin American country ranked in the world's top 10 for tourist visits, receiving 39.3 million visitors in 2017. Argentina followed far behind with 6.7 million, then Brazil with 6.6 million. In tourism earnings that year Mexico led with US$21,333 million, ahead of the Dominican Republic and Brazil. Visitors come for Machu Picchu in Peru, Iguazu Falls, the Galapagos Islands in Ecuador, and the Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia.

    China has become the region's new economic gravity. Imports from China were valued at 8.3 billion dollars in 2000. By 2022 that figure reached 450 billion dollars, making China the largest trading partner of South America. Loans have followed, raising concerns about debt traps, with Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador, and Argentina borrowing the most between 2005 and 2016.

    The Great American Interchange offers a fitting last image. About 2.7 million years ago, as the volcanic Isthmus of Panama rose from the sea floor, land animals migrated between two continents that had been separate. The land bridge that joined the Neotropic and Nearctic realms to form the Americas was, like the region's name, an accident of geography that became a shared fate.

Common questions

What is Latin America and how is it defined?

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.

Who coined the term Latin America and when?

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.

Why was the term Latin America originally created?

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.

Which countries are considered part of Latin America?

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.

Why is Latin America the most unequal region in the world?

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.

What does Latin America produce for the global economy?

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.

All sources

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