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Latin America
A region defined by language, not by latitude
The term was a French invention, promoted around the 1860s to dress up Napoleon III's intervention in Mexico with the claim that the Romance-speaking Americas shared a Latin destiny with France. The name stuck, and it now stretches over roughly twenty countries from the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego where Spanish, Portuguese, or French is the dominant tongue. The definition turns awkward almost immediately: Belize speaks English, Suriname speaks Dutch, and Guyana speaks neither, yet all three sit squarely in the Americas. Haiti, French-speaking, is counted in; Jamaica, next door, is not. Whether francophone Quebec belongs is a question nobody in Quebec has bothered to ask.
Spread across some 20 million square kilometers and more than 80 degrees of latitude, the region holds nearly every landscape the planet offers. The Andes run 7,000 kilometers down the Pacific rim, cresting at Aconcagua's 6,961 meters, the highest summit outside Asia. East of them lies the Amazon Basin, the largest rainforest on earth, drained by a river carrying about a fifth of all the fresh water that reaches the sea. There is the Atacama, the driest desert anywhere; the grasslands of the Pampas; the volcanic spine of Central America; the limestone shelf of the Yucatan; the islands of the Caribbean; and the ice fields of Patagonia. Roughly 665 million people live here, more than four-fifths of them in cities.
Three centuries of Spanish and Portuguese rule left two dominant languages, a Catholic majority, extractive economies, and populations that are overwhelmingly mixed: Indigenous, European, African, and, in Brazil and Peru, Asian. Independence arrived in a wave between 1810 and 1825, but the great landed estates and the dependence on commodity exports outlasted the empires, and the twentieth century brought caudillos, coups, and Cold War proxy wars. What the region exports now goes well beyond copper and soy: liberation theology, magical realism, dependency theory, reggaeton, and the first Latin American pope. Brazil and Mexico between them hold nearly half the people, and inequality, though slowly narrowing, remains among the sharpest on earth.