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The Southern Cone
The temperate tail of South America, and the argument over who is in it
The shape gives the name away. Below the Tropic of Capricorn, South America narrows to a cone, and by the time it reaches Cape Horn it has thinned to a scatter of islands in the Drake Passage. The core of the Southern Cone is Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay: temperate, heavily shaped by European migration, and historically the wealthiest corner of Latin America. Paraguay is usually added on political and economic grounds, though it is landlocked and subtropical and looks little like the rest. Southern Brazil, from Rio Grande do Sul down, shares the same gaucho culture and cattle country without ever quite being counted. Mercosur is the closest thing the region has to a working definition.
The Andes make the western wall, running down the Chile-Argentina border and reaching 6,961 meters at Aconcagua, the highest peak outside Asia. They also make the rain shadow: Pacific moisture dumps on the Chilean side and leaves the Argentine steppe of Patagonia dry, wind-scoured, and nearly empty. North of it lie the Pampas, some of the deepest and most fertile topsoil anywhere, which is why beef and grain built the region's fortunes and its landed elite. The Parana and the Uruguay meet in the vast brown estuary of the Rio de la Plata, Buenos Aires on one bank and Montevideo on the other. Further south, the Patagonian Ice Field is the largest body of ice outside the poles.
Mass migration from Italy, Spain, Germany, and Wales in the century after 1870 remade the population, which is why Buenos Aires feels more like a southern European capital than an Andean one and why Argentine Spanish carries an Italian cadence. Indigenous peoples — Mapuche, Guarani, Selk'nam — were pushed to the margins or destroyed outright in campaigns the states concerned are only now confronting. Beef, wheat, wine, salmon, lithium, and copper drive the economies, and Chile alone supplies about a quarter of the world's copper. All four countries endured brutal military dictatorships between the 1960s and the 1980s, and the truth commissions and trials that followed have become models studied elsewhere. Some 76 million people live here.