The South American world

TL;DR. South America is the fourth-largest continent, joined to North America by the narrow land bridge of Panama and otherwise surrounded by ocean on every side. Long before Europeans arrived, it held sophisticated civilizations, above all the Inca Empire, which ruled the longest mountain range on Earth without wheels, iron tools, or a system of writing. In the 1500s Spain and Portugal divided the continent between them, conquered its empires, and built colonies on silver, sugar, and forced labor, at an enormous human cost to indigenous peoples and to the millions of enslaved Africans brought across the Atlantic. Independence came in the 1820s through two very different routes: republics born from years of hard fighting in Spanish South America, and a monarchy that broke away from Portugal with barely a shot fired in Brazil. What followed was two centuries of new nations working out who they were: strongman rulers, border wars over resources, populist leaders, military dictatorships backed and opposed from abroad, and, in recent decades, a mostly democratic continent still wrestling with inflation, debt, and deep inequality. This chapter lays out that shared history before the book turns to eight countries and one grouped chapter on the Guianas.

Key takeaways

• South America is a distinct continent, smaller and narrower than "Latin America," a cultural label that also includes Mexico, Central America, and parts of the Caribbean.
• The Andes mountains and the Amazon rainforest split the continent into two very different worlds, a highland one and a lowland one, and that split shaped where civilizations rose and how colonization played out.
• Before Columbus, the Andes produced a series of complex societies, capped by the Inca Empire, one of the largest states in the pre-industrial world.
• Spain and Portugal divided the continent by treaty in 1494, then conquered and colonized it along very different lines: Spanish viceroyalties built on mining and forced indigenous labor, and Portuguese Brazil built on plantation agriculture and enslaved African labor.
• Independence in the 1820s came from two directions at once, Simon Bolivar's armies from the north and Jose de San Martin's from the south, while Brazil broke from Portugal peacefully and kept a monarchy until 1889.
• The two centuries since independence have run through fragmentation, strongman rule, costly wars between neighbors, populism, Cold War dictatorships, and today, a mostly democratic continent still working through economic instability and, in Venezuela's case, outright collapse.

Main events at a glance

What "South America" means

South America is one of the seven continents, sitting almost entirely in the Southern Hemisphere and connected to North America only by the narrow isthmus of Panama, a strip of land in Central America. It is bordered by the Pacific Ocean to the west and the Atlantic Ocean to the east, and it stretches from the tropics near the equator down to Cape Horn, near Antarctica. Twelve independent countries sit on the continent, along with French Guiana, a territory still governed by France.

People often use "South America" loosely alongside two other terms that mean something different, and mixing them up causes real confusion.

"Latin America" is a cultural and linguistic label, not a continent. It refers to the parts of the Americas where a Latin-derived language, mainly Spanish or Portuguese (and, in Haiti, French), became the dominant language through European colonization. That includes all of South America, plus Mexico, most of Central America, and parts of the Caribbean such as Cuba and the Dominican Republic. So Latin America is bigger than South America: every South American country except the Guianas is part of Latin America, but Latin America also reaches far outside South America.

"Hispanic America" is narrower still. It means the parts of the Americas that speak Spanish specifically, which excludes Brazil, since Brazil speaks Portuguese, and excludes French-speaking Haiti. Hispanic America overlaps heavily with Latin America but is not the same set of countries.

Don't be confused: South America, Latin America, and Hispanic America are three different circles, not three names for the same thing. South America is a continent, a matter of geography. Latin America is a cultural and linguistic zone that includes South America plus Mexico, Central America, and part of the Caribbean. Hispanic America is narrower again: it means the Spanish-speaking parts of that zone, which leaves out Brazil (Portuguese) and Haiti (French). A useful shortcut: Brazil is in South America and in Latin America, but it is not in Hispanic America.

Geography: how the land shaped the people

South America's geography is dominated by two enormous features that sit almost back to back: a mountain wall down one side and a river basin filling most of the rest.

The Andes mountains run down the entire western edge of the continent, hugging the Pacific coast from Venezuela and Colombia in the north to the southern tip of Chile and Argentina. They are the longest continental mountain range on Earth, and in places they reach heights of nearly 7,000 meters (about 23,000 feet). The Andes gave rise to the continent's oldest and most complex civilizations, because their high valleys and plateaus, cool, defensible, and suited to particular crops like potatoes and a grain called quinoa, could support dense, organized populations even though the terrain looks unforgiving to an outsider.

East of the Andes lies the Amazon basin, the drainage area of the Amazon River and its many tributaries. It holds the world's largest tropical rainforest, spanning Brazil and reaching into Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, and several other countries. Further south, the Pampas are wide, flat, fertile grasslands across central Argentina and Uruguay, which became one of the world's great farming and cattle-ranching regions. Below the Pampas, Patagonia stretches across the southern end of the continent into Chile and Argentina, a dry, windswept, sparsely populated land of steppe and, further south, glaciers.

This geography split South America, in rough terms, into two different worlds. One is the Andean highland world, where the old civilizations rose and where large indigenous populations still live today, especially in Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador. The other is the lowland and coastal world, made up of the Amazon basin, the Pampas, the Caribbean coast, and Brazil's long Atlantic shoreline, which developed differently and, after conquest, drew far more European settlement and enslaved African labor. Keeping this highland-lowland divide in mind helps explain why neighboring countries in South America can look and feel so different from one another.

Before Columbus: the civilizations of the Andes and beyond

South America's deep history did not begin with Europeans, and it did not begin with the Inca either. The Andes hosted a long sequence of societies stretching back thousands of years, each building on what came before.

The earliest is Norte Chico, also called the Caral civilization after its best-known site, Caral, on the coast of Peru. Starting around 3000 BCE, Norte Chico people built large ceremonial centers with earthen pyramids, sunken plazas, and organized towns, making it one of the oldest complex civilizations known anywhere in the Americas, roughly contemporary with the early stages of ancient Egypt. It had no writing and, remarkably, no evidence of large-scale warfare, which is unusual among the world's early civilizations.

Later Andean cultures each left their own mark. Chavin, centered on a temple site called Chavin de Huantar high in the Peruvian Andes, spread a shared religious style and iconography across a wide area between roughly 900 and 200 BCE without ever building a unified empire. On the southern coast, the Nazca culture is remembered for the Nazca Lines, huge figures and geometric shapes drawn into the desert floor by clearing away dark surface stones, visible fully only from the air, whose exact purpose (religious, astronomical, or both) is still debated by archaeologists. Around the same period, the Moche built pyramid temples and produced strikingly realistic pottery and metalwork on Peru's northern coast. Later still, Tiwanaku, near Lake Titicaca on the border of modern Bolivia and Peru, and Wari, based further north, built the first true Andean states, with organized administration and long-distance trade networks, setting patterns that later empires would build on.

All of this fed into the Inca Empire, called Tawantinsuyu in the Inca language, Quechua, meaning roughly "the four parts together." Starting from the city of Cusco, high in the Peruvian Andes, the Inca expanded with startling speed in the 1400s, and by the time Europeans arrived in the 1530s they ruled a state stretching from what is now southern Colombia to central Chile, the largest empire the pre-Columbian Americas ever produced. They achieved this without the wheel, without iron tools, and without a system of writing, three things often assumed necessary for running a large state.

In place of writing, the Inca kept records using the quipu, a device made of knotted and colored cords in which the pattern, position, and type of knot encoded numbers and, some scholars argue, other kinds of information as well. To move armies, officials, and goods across their vast and mountainous territory, they built the Qhapaq Nan, a road system of an estimated 30,000 kilometers (about 19,000 miles) that included suspension bridges, stone paving, and way stations, one of the great engineering achievements of the pre-industrial world. The empire ran on the mit'a, a system of mandatory labor tribute in which communities owed the state a set amount of work each year, building roads, farming state and religious lands, serving in the army, or working in mines, rather than paying in money or goods.

Don't be confused: the Amazon rainforest was not empty of history before Europeans arrived. For a long time, popular imagination treated the Amazon basin as untouched wilderness with only small, scattered bands of people. Archaeological work in recent decades has overturned that picture. Parts of the Amazon held large, organized settlements, built earthworks and raised fields for farming, dug geoglyphs (large geometric ditches) into the earth, and reshaped the forest itself, for instance by cultivating useful tree species over wide areas. The old myth of an empty, untouched rainforest says more about how little Europeans understood it than about the people who actually lived there.

Conquest and empire: two crowns divide a continent

Spain and Portugal moved to claim the Americas before either fully understood what they had found. In 1494 the two crowns signed the Treaty of Tordesillas, which drew a north-south line across the Atlantic and, with the backing of the Pope, divided the non-Christian world outside Europe between them: lands west of the line for Spain, lands east of it for Portugal. Because the line ran through what is now Brazil, it gave Portugal a foothold on the eastern edge of South America while leaving the rest of the continent to Spain. The wider story of the treaty and the two crowns behind it is told in Spain and Portugal.

The conquest of the Inca Empire came in 1532, when a small Spanish force led by Francisco Pizarro reached the Andean town of Cajamarca. There they seized the Inca emperor, Atahualpa, at a meeting that turned into an ambush, and held him for a huge ransom in gold and silver. Spain took the ransom and executed Atahualpa anyway, then pushed on to take Cusco and, over the following decades, the rest of the empire. As elsewhere in the Americas, small Spanish forces succeeded partly through weapons, horses, and alliances with peoples who resented Inca rule, and overwhelmingly through European diseases such as smallpox, against which indigenous populations had no immunity.

Out of this conquest, Spain organized its South American holdings into viceroyalties, large administrative territories run by a viceroy, a governor who ruled in the king's name. The Viceroyalty of Peru, based in Lima, was the first and for a long time the most important. As Spanish territory grew, two more were carved out later: the Viceroyalty of New Granada (covering roughly today's Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Panama) and the Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata (covering roughly today's Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia). Portuguese Brazil developed on an entirely separate track, first around sugar plantations along the northeast coast, later around gold and diamonds found inland, and it was never folded into the Spanish administrative system at all.

The colonial economy ran on extraction and forced labor. Vast silver deposits at Potosi, high in the Andes in what is now Bolivia, made Potosi for a time one of the largest and richest cities in the world and helped fund Spain's wars in Europe. The encomienda system granted Spanish colonists the right to demand labor and tribute from indigenous communities in a given area, nominally in exchange for protection and religious instruction, though in practice it functioned as a system of forced labor with few real limits on abuse. The Catholic Church spread across the continent alongside the crown, building missions to convert indigenous peoples; the Jesuits, a religious order, set up reducciones, self-contained mission settlements, especially in the region straddling modern Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil, that in some cases offered indigenous residents a degree of protection from colonial labor demands, though always within a system that ended their independence.

The human cost of all this was immense. Indigenous populations across the Andes and the rest of the continent collapsed over the century or so following conquest, from epidemic disease, warfare, and forced labor in mines and on plantations, with death tolls in the many millions. Alongside this, both Spain and above all Portugal became major participants in the transatlantic slave trade, transporting millions of enslaved Africans across the ocean to work the sugar plantations and later gold mines of Brazil, more than to any other single destination in the Americas. This forced migration shaped the population, culture, and deep inequalities of Brazil and other parts of the continent down to the present day, and it deserves to be stated plainly rather than softened.

Independence: two liberators from opposite ends

The crisis that broke Spain's hold on South America did not start in the Americas at all. In 1808 Napoleon invaded Spain, deposed the Spanish king, and put his own brother on the throne. This threw Spanish America into a crisis of legitimacy: if the king himself was a prisoner and his throne occupied by a Frenchman, who had the right to rule in his name across the ocean? Local councils and juntas sprang up across Spanish America claiming authority in the king's absence, and within a few years many of these movements had turned toward outright independence.

Two military leaders led the fight from opposite directions. Simon Bolivar, born in Caracas in what is now Venezuela, led campaigns across the north, liberating Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Panama and uniting them for a time into a single state called Gran Colombia. Jose de San Martin, an Argentine-born general, led a separate campaign from the south, crossing the Andes from Argentina to liberate Chile and then sailing north to help free Peru. In 1822 the two men met in the Ecuadorian port city of Guayaquil, in a private conversation whose exact contents are still debated by historians, after which San Martin withdrew from the fight and left the final defeat of Spanish forces in Peru to Bolivar's armies. That final defeat came at the Battle of Ayacucho in 1824, high in the Peruvian Andes, which effectively ended Spanish colonial rule on the South American mainland.

Brazil's path to independence looked nothing like this. When Napoleon's forces invaded Portugal in 1808, the Portuguese royal family and much of its court fled across the Atlantic to Rio de Janeiro rather than stay and face capture, the only time in history a European monarchy relocated to one of its own colonies. Brazil was elevated to a kingdom in its own right, joined with Portugal and the Algarve, and Rio functioned for years as the seat of the Portuguese crown. When the royal family eventually returned to Portugal, Prince Pedro stayed behind as regent, and in 1822 he declared Brazil's independence, becoming Emperor Pedro I. Brazil kept a monarchy of its own, unusual in a hemisphere of new republics, until 1889, while nearly every Spanish-speaking country to its west and south emerged from independence as a republic from the start.

After independence: fragmentation, strongmen, and border wars

Independence did not settle what the new countries would be. Bolivar's Gran Colombia, meant to unite the north as a single power, broke apart by 1830 into the separate states of Venezuela, Colombia (then including Panama), and Ecuador, undone by regional rivalries and disputes over how much power should sit in a central government.

Across the newly independent continent, a recurring pattern took hold known as caudillismo, rule by a caudillo, a personalist strongman leader who commanded loyalty through military force, patronage, and personal charisma rather than through stable institutions. Weak new states, unclear borders, and armies still under arms from the independence wars made this kind of rule common in the decades that followed, and versions of it would resurface again and again over the next two centuries.

Border disputes between the new countries sometimes exploded into full wars. The most devastating was the War of the Triple Alliance (1864 to 1870), in which Paraguay fought Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay simultaneously. The war ended in catastrophe for Paraguay, which lost a large share of its territory and, by some estimates, the majority of its adult male population, one of the most disproportionate death tolls of any war in modern history. Later, the War of the Pacific (1879 to 1884) pitted Chile against Peru and Bolivia over control of nitrate-rich desert territory. Chile won decisively, and the settlement left Bolivia permanently landlocked, without a coastline, a loss Bolivia still refers to and has periodically pressed to reverse.

Through much of this period, the new countries built their economies around a single valuable export: silver and later tin from Bolivia, seabird droppings called guano and then nitrates (used in fertilizer and explosives) from Peru and Chile, rubber from the Amazon basin, coffee from Brazil and Colombia, and beef and grain from Argentina's Pampas. This pattern, wealth concentrated in one or two exports sold mainly to industrializing Europe and North America, brought booms and busts and left several countries dependent on the swings of a single commodity's price.

The 20th century: populism, dictatorship, and the Cold War

The 1900s brought a new kind of politician to South America: the populist leader who built a mass following, often among urban workers, through direct appeals, social programs, and a personal style of leadership. Juan Peron in Argentina and Getulio Vargas in Brazil are the best-known examples, each dominating their country's politics for years by combining nationalism, labor rights, and a charismatic, larger-than-life public presence.

From the 1960s through the 1980s, much of the continent swung the other way, into a wave of military dictatorships that seized power, often justifying themselves as necessary to stop the spread of communism during the Cold War, the decades-long standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union. The United States, worried about Soviet or Cuban-inspired revolutions in its own hemisphere, backed several of these governments and, in some documented cases, actively supported the coups that brought them to power. These regimes were frequently marked by the disappearance, torture, and killing of political opponents. One especially dark chapter was Operation Condor, a coordinated campaign among the intelligence and security services of several South American dictatorships to track down, and in many cases kill, exiled dissidents across national borders. The full detail of this era, country by country, including how each nation returned to democracy, is told in the chapters ahead.

Shared threads: language, faith, and everyday life

Despite its political fragmentation, South America is bound together by threads that cross borders.

Don't be confused: not all of South America speaks Spanish. Spanish is the majority language, official in most of the continent's countries. Brazil, however, speaks Portuguese, a separate though related language, and is the continent's only Portuguese-speaking country. Because Brazil alone holds roughly half of South America's population and land area, saying "South Americans speak Spanish" is wrong for a very large share of the continent.

Roman Catholicism arrived with Spanish and Portuguese colonization and dominated religious life for centuries, and it remains the largest single faith across the continent today. In recent decades, evangelical and Pentecostal Protestant churches have grown rapidly, especially in Brazil and Central America's neighbors to the north, reshaping the religious landscape in ways still playing out. Alongside both, indigenous spiritual traditions and, in Brazil and parts of the Caribbean coast, Afro-descended traditions born from enslaved Africans' own beliefs have persisted and, in various forms, blended with Christian practice.

Centuries of contact, conquest, and enslavement produced extensive racial and cultural mixing. Mestizo, a term for people of mixed indigenous and European ancestry, and mulatto, a term for people of mixed African and European ancestry, describe large shares of the population in many countries, though both terms carry a complicated legacy tied to colonial-era racial hierarchies that ranked people by ancestry, and their use and meaning vary a great deal by country today.

Football (soccer) is close to a continental religion in its own right, and South America has produced some of the sport's greatest players and most storied national teams and rivalries; individual country chapters will cover this in more depth. The continent has also produced a literary tradition well out of proportion to its size, especially the style known as magical realism, in which fantastic or magical events are woven into otherwise realistic settings and treated as ordinary. Colombia's Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Argentina's Jorge Luis Borges, Peru's Mario Vargas Llosa, and Chile's Isabel Allende are among the writers who carried South American literature to a worldwide audience, and each will appear again in their own country's chapter.

Where the continent stands today

By the early 2000s, nearly every country in South America had returned to some form of democratic government, ending the dictatorship era that had gripped so much of the continent a generation earlier. That democratic norm has mostly held, even as individual countries have gone through serious strain: recurring bouts of high inflation, sovereign debt crises, and deep inequality remain common threads. Politically, the continent lived through what is often called the "Pink Tide," a wave of left-leaning governments elected across much of South America in the 2000s, which later ebbed as several of those governments lost power or popularity, only for left and right to keep trading places in the years since.

The starkest exception to the return-to-normal story is Venezuela, whose economy and political system collapsed over the 2010s, driving hyperinflation, severe shortages, and an exodus of millions of people, the largest migration crisis in the recent history of the Americas. Meanwhile, China has become a major trading partner and lender across the continent, buying soybeans, copper, oil, and other raw materials and financing infrastructure, a relationship that now sits alongside South America's long-standing economic and political ties to the United States. The fuller geopolitical picture, including how these relationships play out today, is covered later in Geopolitics today.

The chapters ahead take each of these threads and follow them into a single country's story: how a shared colonial past, shared struggles for independence, and shared 20th-century turbulence produced countries as different as Chile's narrow strip along the Pacific and Brazil's continent-sized expanse. Now we begin with the giant that anchors the continent 👉 Brazil