South America

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  South America covers 17,840,000 square kilometers, an area large enough to rank it fourth among continents, behind only Asia, Africa, and North America. It sits entirely in the Western Hemisphere, mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a sliver crossing into the Northern Hemisphere. Twelve sovereign countries share it, from Argentina in the far south to Venezuela in the north. The Pacific Ocean borders it on the west. The Atlantic borders it on the north and east. To the south lies the Drake Passage, and beyond that, Antarctica. This is a place of extremes. The world's largest river by volume runs through it. So does the longest mountain range on Earth. How did a continent first reached by people crossing an ancient land bridge become home to cities of precise, unmatched stonework, then to the colonies of two competing European crowns? Why does almost half its population live in a single country? And how did one warship type push its governments toward a ruinous arms race? The answers begin around 14,500 years ago, with the oldest human footprints found this far south.

• 2. First Footprints

  ›

  Around 14,500 years ago, people left traces at the Monte Verde II site in Chile, among the oldest evidence of human presence anywhere on the continent. They had arrived by a long road south. At least 15,000 years ago, people crossed the Bering Land Bridge, now the Bering Strait, from territory that is present-day Russia. They moved through North America and entered the south through the Isthmus of Panama. From around 13,000 years ago, the Fishtail projectile point style spread widely across the continent. Its disappearance around 11,000 years ago lined up with the loss of South America's megafauna. That same extinction wave claimed 83 percent of the continent's large mammals at the end of the Pleistocene, among the highest losses of any continent. Among the casualties were saber-toothed cats, ground sloths, glyptodonts, and gomphotheres. The equines Hippidion and Equus neogeus vanished, as did all remaining South American native ungulates. Farming and herding followed in the highlands. South American cultures began domesticating llamas and alpacas in the Andes around 3500 BC, using them for meat, wool, and the transport of goods. By 2000 BC, agrarian communities had settled across the Andes and surrounding regions, supported by new irrigation systems and by fishing along the coast.

• 3. Cities Of Stone

  ›

  Caral-Supe rose on the central Peruvian coast as one of the earliest known civilizations of the continent. Though its people made no ceramics, they built monumental architecture, and Huaricanga in the Fortaleza area is generally dated to around 3500 BC. That puts it among the oldest cities in the world, contemporaneous with the pyramids of Ancient Egypt. It stands as one of just six sites where civilization arose separately in the ancient world. Chavin followed by 900 BC, with artifacts found at Chavin de Huantar in modern Peru at an elevation of 3177 meters. The Chavin civilization spanned 900 BC to 300 BC. On the central coast of Peru, the Moche flourished from 100 BC to 700 AD, alongside the Paracas and the Nazca, who lasted from 400 BC to 800 AD. At the Altiplano, Tiwanaku ran a large commercial network built on religion from 100 BC to 1200 AD. Around the seventh century, both Tiwanaku and the Wari Empire spread their influence across the Andean region. The Inca held their capital at the great city of Cusco and dominated the Andes from 1438 to 1533. They called their realm Tawantinsuyu, the land of the four regions, in Quechua. Inca rule reached nearly a hundred linguistic or ethnic communities, some nine to fourteen million people. A road system of 25,000 kilometers connected them, and terrace farming climbed the mountain slopes. Far to the south, the Mapuche in central and southern Chile resisted European and Chilean settlers, waging the Arauco War for more than 300 years.

• 4. A Line On The Map

  ›

  In 1494, Portugal and Spain signed the Treaty of Tordesillas, agreeing with the support of the Pope that all land outside Europe should be an exclusive duopoly between them. The treaty drew an imaginary line along a north-south meridian 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, roughly 46 degrees 37 minutes west. Land to the west would belong to Spain, land to the east to Portugal. Accurate measurements of longitude were impossible at the time, so the line was never strictly enforced. Portugal expanded Brazil across the meridian anyway. Beginning in the 1530s, foreign conquistadors exploited the people and natural resources of the continent, first from Spain and later from Portugal. European diseases tore through the native population, who had no immune resistance. Smallpox, influenza, measles, and typhus caused large-scale depopulation under Spanish control. Forced labor systems, including the haciendas and the mining mit'a, deepened the loss. Spaniards purged native cultural practices that hindered conversion to Christianity, yet many groups simply blended Catholicism with their established beliefs. The Roman Catholic Church's evangelization in Quechua, Aymara, and Guarani helped those languages survive in oral form. Many native artworks were treated as pagan idols and destroyed, including gold and silver sculptures melted down before transport to Spain or Portugal. Over time the natives and Spaniards interbred, forming a mestizo class. Guyana passed from Dutch to British control, with a brief French occupation during the Napoleonic Wars. Suriname, first explored by the Spanish in the sixteenth century and settled by the English, became a Dutch colony in 1667.

• 5. Bondage And Its End

  ›

  The slave trade brought enslaved Africans to South American colonies beginning with the Portuguese in 1502. The main destinations of this phase were the Caribbean colonies and Brazil. Nearly 40 percent of all African slaves trafficked to the Americas went to Brazil, an estimated 4.9 million people from Africa during the period from 1501 to 1866. The pattern differed by empire. In contrast to other European colonies, Spanish colonists mainly enslaved indigenous Americans, and that enslavement continued well into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1750, the Portuguese Crown abolished the enslavement of indigenous peoples in colonial Brazil, on the belief that they were unfit for labor and less effective than enslaved Africans. Abolition came slowly across the continent, country by country. Chile was the first to abolish slavery, in 1823, followed by Uruguay in 1830 and Bolivia in 1831. Guyana ended it in 1833, Colombia and Ecuador in 1851, Argentina in 1853, Peru and Venezuela in 1854, Suriname in 1863, and Paraguay in 1869. In 1888, Brazil became the last South American nation and the last country in the Western world to abolish slavery.

• 6. Breaking From The Crowns

  ›

  The Peninsular War, fought from 1807 to 1814 as a theater of the Napoleonic Wars, upended Spanish and Portuguese rule overseas. Napoleon invaded Portugal, but the House of Braganza escaped capture by fleeing to Brazil. He captured King Ferdinand VII of Spain and installed his own brother in his place. Popular resistance created Juntas to rule in the name of the captured king. Cities across the Spanish colonies claimed the same right, splitting patriots who wanted autonomy from royalists who backed Spanish authority. The fight for independence found two decisive leaders. Simon Bolivar of Venezuela led a great uprising in the north, then marched his army south toward Lima, the capital of the Viceroyalty of Peru. Jose de San Martin of Argentina led an army across the Andes with Chilean expatriates and liberated Chile, then built a fleet to reach Peru by sea. In 1822 the two men met at the Guayaquil Conference in Ecuador and failed to agree on how to govern the liberated nations. Two years later, Bolivar's forces beat the Spanish at the Battle of Ayacucho, securing the independence of Peru and the rest of the continent. Brazil took a different path. Dom Pedro I, son of the Portuguese King Dom Joao VI, proclaimed the independent Kingdom of Brazil in 1822, which became the Empire of Brazil. Portugal accepted the independence diplomatically in 1825, on condition of a high compensation paid by Brazil and mediated by the United Kingdom.

• 7. Wars Among Neighbors

  ›

  By 1848, most of the new nations had seen their borders altered by war or contested, despite having accepted the 1810 lines under the uti possidetis iuris principle. The first separatist attempt came in 1820, when the Argentine province of Entre Rios broke away under a caudillo named Ramirez. He never truly intended an independent Entre Rios, and the territory was reincorporated into the United Provinces in 1821. In 1825 the Cisplatine Province declared independence from the Empire of Brazil. The resulting Cisplatine War ended when the United Kingdom intervened, proclaimed a tie, and created the Oriental Republic of Uruguay. The continent's bloodiest conflict began when the Paraguayan dictator Francisco Solano Lopez ordered the invasion of the Brazilian provinces of Mato Grosso and Rio Grande do Sul. His attempt to cross Argentine territory without approval drew the pro-Brazilian Argentine government into the fight. In 1865, Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay signed the Treaty of the Triple Alliance against Paraguay. The Paraguayan War was the second total war the world had seen after the American Civil War. It took almost six years and ended with the complete devastation of Paraguay. The country lost 40 percent of its territory to Brazil and Argentina and 60 percent of its population, including 90 percent of its men. Lopez was killed in battle, and Brazil maintained occupation forces until 1876. The century's last regional war was the War of the Pacific, with Bolivia and Peru on one side and Chile on the other. War began in 1879 when Chilean troops occupied Bolivian ports. The Bolivians were defeated by 1880, Lima was occupied in 1881, and Chile annexed territories that left Bolivia landlocked.

• 8. Dreadnoughts And Dictators

  ›

  Early in the twentieth century, the three wealthiest South American countries entered a vastly expensive naval arms race, set off by a new warship type, the dreadnought. At one point the Argentine government spent a fifth of its entire yearly budget on just two dreadnoughts, a figure that excluded later in-service costs. For the Brazilian dreadnoughts, those running costs reached sixty percent of the initial purchase. Brazil broke from its neighbors by joining both World Wars. In 1917 it declared war on the Central Powers and sent a small fleet to the Mediterranean and troops to serve with British and French forces, the only South American country in the First World War. In 1942, after German attacks on Brazilian ships, it declared war on the Axis, sent naval and air forces against submarines in the South Atlantic, and dispatched an expeditionary force to the Italian Campaign. The continent became a battlefield of the Cold War late in the century. Democratically elected governments in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, and Paraguay were overthrown by military dictatorships in the 1960s and 1970s. To curtail opposition, these governments detained tens of thousands of political prisoners, many of whom were tortured or killed through inter-state collaboration. In 1982, Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, a British dependent territory. The Falklands War ended 74 days later with an Argentine surrender. Since the 1980s, a wave of democratization has spread across the continent, and democratic rule is now widespread. The last international war fought on South American soil was the 1995 Cenepa War between Ecuador and Peru. Starting with the election of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela in 1998, the region saw a pink tide, the election of leftist and center-left administrations across most countries, leaving the Andes and the Amazon to face a new century with familiar pressures over land, resources, and who controls them.