Area and Population Physical Geography and Human Adaptations

JL.Types of Farms

JM.Minerals and Mining

JN.Free Trade Agreements

JO.Sending Money Home

JP.Tourism in Latin America

119. Geopolitical Issues

Latin America includes all thirty-eight countries of the Western Hemisphere south of the United States, including the Caribbean. The name “Latin” America comes from the colonizing influences of Spain and Portugal in the region since 1492. Latin America is subdivided into Middle America (which includes Mexico) Central America, the Caribbean, and South America.

There are 569 million people in Latin America, most of them living in South America’s “Rimland” or Middle American central highlands. Most Latin American countries have a well-defined core and a sparsely inhabited hinterland. This region is much more urbanized than the world average. Plateaus and very high mountains such as the Sierra Madre and the Andes dominate the western limits of Latin America, while lesser highlands and extensive lowlands are found elsewhere. Extensive tropical rainforests, grasslands, and desert conditions cover most of Latin America’s land.

Altitudinal zonation is a useful tool for understanding Latin America’s physical geography with respect to human adaptations. From lowest elevation to highest, these zones are called the tierra caliente, tierra templada, tierra fría, and tierra helada. Each of these zones contains distinctive human settlement and agricultural patterns.

Before the arrival of Europeans in 1492, an estimated 50 to 100 million Native Americans lived in Latin America, including such groups as the Maya, Aztecs, and Incas. There were also many more that did not develop urban livelihoods. While many Native American groups and languages survive to this day, their numbers declined sharply after European colonization began, primarily due to diseases such as smallpox. Europeans largely settled the highlands, but also established coastal port cities, which had not existed previously. Many black slaves from Africa were also transported to Latin America to work on tropical lowland plantations. Subsequent racial mixing resulted in mestizos, a mixture of European and Native American, and mulattos, a mixture of European and African.

Latin America is a poor region overall, with one third of its residents living in poverty; many of the poorest people live in crowded shantytowns that surround the wealthy major cities. Latin America has great mineral wealth, especially in copper, iron ore, and oil. Tourism is also vital to many nations, especially in the Caribbean. Many Latin American nations depend on agricultural products for half or more of all export revenue, though in recent years agricultural importance has dropped slightly as more diversified economies emerge. Most agricultural exports come from large commercial estates called latifundia or haciendas. Subsistence agriculture is grown on marginal land divided into small, often sharecropped holdings called minifundia, where productivity is low and soil degradation and erosion is high. Land reform has been a contentious political and social issue in many countries of this region.

Several free trade agreements are in effect across various portions of Latin America, including NAFTA, Mercosur, the Andean Community, and the Central American Common Market. The U.S. has proposed several more, including a Free Trade Area of the Americas and a free-trade agreement with Central America. Workers from all over Latin America, but particularly Mexico, stream into the United States for jobs, and the remittances these workers send home surpasses the amount they receive in foreign aid and investment in the area.

Latin America is in the “backyard” of the United States, and the U.S. has long held that it has the power to supervise the internal affairs of Latin American countries to ensure its own national security. Cuba, Colombia, Haiti, and many Central American nations have experienced American involvement in their affairs. The U.S. was instrumental in constructing the Panama Canal, which it owned until 1999. Latin America is also the source of many illegal drugs that wind up in the U.S. Free trade, drug trafficking, safeguarding the Panama Canal and ensuring access to Latin American oil are the major U.S. foreign policy objectives in this region.

233. 
     Latin America has two main areas with high population densities. The first area is generally a highland extending along a volcanic belt from central Mexico into Central America. The second, much larger area is called the “Rimland” and is a discontinuous ring around the margins of South America. [p. 522]
     

234. 
     Latin America has a great variety of climates and biomes. The tropical rain forest and tropical savanna climates and biomes (centered on the Amazon basin and stretching over much of Central and South America) occupy the largest portions of the region. Much of Mexico, northern Venezuela, northeastern Brazil, and the coasts of Peru and Chile experience desert conditions. Central and southern Chile has a marine west coast climate, while most of Argentina has a prairie and steppe biome. Large areas of undifferentiated highland conditions exist in the plateaus and mountains of Mexico and Central America and down the spine of the Andes Mountains in South America. [p. 527]
     

235. 
     3. The tierra caliente is the lowest elevation zone, where crops such as bananas, sugarcane, rice, and cacao are grown in the hot, humid lowland environment. Most of Latin America’s blacks live in this zone. Above 3,000 feet lies the tierra templada, where the dominant crop is coffee. This is a prominent zone of European-influenced settlement and agriculture. The tierra fria, beginning at 6,000 feet, is where wheat, barley, and maize are grown. Settlement in this region is largely Native American based upon subsistence agriculture. Above 12,000 feet lies the tierra helada, which supports some grains and livestock. [pp. 527-530]
     

236. 
     An El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) event begins when winds that normally blow from east to west across the Pacific reverse direction, blowing from west to east and raising the water temperature off the South American coast. ENSO events can last a year or more, causing global climatic shifts, such as increased rainfall in places such as eastern Africa, southern Brazil and Polynesia, while high temperatures and droughts can occur in Indonesia and northern Australia, the northeastern U.S. and southern Canada, and southern Africa. Warmer western Pacific waters are less nutrient-rich than colder eastern Pacific waters, so food chains are also disrupted and wildlife losses are frequent. [p. 532]
     

237. 
     In 1492, Latin America was home to an estimated 50 to 100 million Native Americans subdivided into many tribes and civilizations. Among these groups, some were much more powerful than others. At this time, the Maya lived in what are now southern Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala. The Aztecs lived in central Mexico and established a great city at Tenochtitlán, which was later built over by Mexico City. In South America, the Incas ruled an empire about 2,000 miles long from Ecuador southward into central Chile. [pp. 531-534]
     

238. 
     Of the languages spoken in Latin America before 1492, many of them still survive today but they are not widespread. The Mayan language family is still prominent across southern Mexico and Guatemala, while Guaraní is spoken in Paraguay and Quechua in Bolivia and Peru. With colonization European languages were introduced to the region, and today Spanish is the main language of the majority of Latin Americans. Portuguese is the language of Brazil, while English, French, and Dutch are spoken in much more limited amounts in and around the Caribbean. [pp. 534-535]
     

239. 
     In terms of religion, Latin America is almost uniformly Roman Catholic, with various Native American faiths still lingering in various areas, some of which have syncretized with Catholicism. Protestant denominations have made some converts in Latin America. Jamaica has embraced Rastafari, a twentieth century black empowerment faith. [p. 537]
     

240. 
     Some of the major crops exported from Latin America include coffee, bananas, sugar, and soybeans. Latin America also exports many mineral products such as iron ore, bauxite, copper, silver, tin, lead, and zinc, and petroleum products are also vitally important exports for several nations in the region. [pp. 539-542]
     

241. 
     In Latin America, large estates with a strong commercial orientation are called latifundia (or plantations or haciendas), and smaller holdings with a subsistence orientation are called minifundia. Latifundia are often rich plots of land that have been held by the same family for centuries, while minifundia are usually located on agriculturally marginal lands farmed on a sharecropping basis. The crops most commonly raised (especially in Middle America) are corn, beans, and squash. In Latin America, the most productive agricultural land is owned by few: wealthy families, agribusiness, and the church. Land reform would redistribute this resource to subsistence and small commercial farmers, and may stem the tide of the region’s growing urban poor. [pp. 539-542]
     

242. 
     Although Mexico is the only Latin American member, NAFTA is the most important economic bloc in the region. Its effect on Mexico has been a “wash” in the decade since the free-trade area’s implementation, though, with the country neither significantly better nor worse off from it. In South America, Mercosur (the Southern Cone Common Market) was established in 1991 between Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay, and it reduced tariffs and other trade barriers between member countries that greatly increased the amount of trade. Other, smaller economic zones also exist in the region, such as the Central American Common Market, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), and the Andean Community. The United States is also proposing additional free-trade areas in the region, such as the Free Trade Area of the Americas and the Central American Free Trade Agreement. [pp. 542-544]
     

243. 
     Earned savings sent home by people working abroad are called remittances. In Latin America, remittances usually come from people working in the United States. In periodic transfers of small amounts, such as $200, Latin Americans working in the U.S. sent home over $45 billion in 2006, making remittances a vital part of many Latin American economies. [p. 544]
     

244. 
     The U.S. has been the most significant country in Latin American affairs dating back to the early nineteenth century. The explicit aim of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 was to put European countries on notice that they should cast a hegemonic eye elsewhere. The 1904 Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, often associated with gunboat diplomacy, supports the U.S. contention that it has the right to intervene in the affairs of its Latin American neighbors as a means of ensuring U.S. national security and stimulating the national economy. The creation of the country of country of Panama, with its historically important canal, is a case in point. During the Cold War, the U.S. intervened in Latin American affairs in order to fight the spread of communism, most notably with Cuba (the Cuban Missile Crisis and Bay of Pigs invasion). More recently, the U.S. has waged a war on drugs insofar as Latin America has been a principal supplier of drugs like cocaine and marijuana to consumers in the U.S. At the same time, the U.S. has funneled considerable foreign aid to Latin America and economic ties uniting the Western Hemisphere nations will doubtless continue to grow in the twenty-first century. [pp. 546-550]
     

This module should enable your students to…

• 
  Recognize how Canada’s proximity to the powerful United States has shaped the country’s economic geography
  
• 
  Appreciate how resource depletion and distance from market and production centers contributed to the economic decline of the Atlantic region
  
• 
  Understand why several sectors of Canada’s population—the French, Inuit, and Prairie Province inhabitants—have pushed for more autonomy and even independence from Canada
  
• 
  See how changing world energy and market conditions have altered indigenous ways of life in the North
  
• 
  Witness the scramble for resources in Arctic lands and waters that has accompanied warming temperatures in the region
  
• 
  Understand the economic rationale for Greenlanders’ wanting to retain their ties with distant Denmark
  

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