Latin America includes the American countries and territories south of the United States where Romance languages, i.e., derived from Latin, are prevalent. Other linguistic areas of America are named after their state languages of European origin: Anglo-America, where English is predominant, Dutch-speaking Suriname, the Netherlands Antilles and Aruba. Greenland, which is a Danish territory, has Danish as its dominant language. According to the political principle, Latin America includes the American territories formerly belonging to Spain or Portugal, the two countries on the Iberian Peninsula where Spanish or Portuguese is predominant: Mexico and most of Central America, South America and the West Indies (or the Caribbean). In this sense, it is synonymous with Ibero-America. Territories where other Romance languages are spoken, such as French (in the Canadian province of Quebec) or Creole (transitional) languages, are often not considered part of Latin America, despite the French origin of the term. Sometimes the term “Latin America” is used to refer to the entire part of the Americas south of the United States, including such countries as Belize, Guyana, Jamaica, Barbados and Suriname, where languages of the Germanic group predominate, but in Brazil the term is applied exclusively to the Spanish-speaking countries of America.
In the concept of “dependent capitalism,” popular in the 1970s and 1980s, its authors saw the original cause of the backwardness of the Latin American region in the late development of the capitalist order here, and this backwardness, in their view, gave rise to dependency. At the same time, a group of scholars called “dependentists” put forward a “dependency theory” that interpreted the problem differently, believing that it was dependency that produced backwardness and not vice versa, since from the beginning of colonization Ibero-America was drawn into the world capitalist system. The colonies had always been “satellites of the world metropolis,” which alienated from them a large part of their wealth. At first, this role was played by Spain and Portugal, and when their domination fell, England, Germany, France and, later, the USA became the “world metropolis”. The accelerated development of these powers was both a cause and a consequence of the deepening underdevelopment of the satellites, and the gap between the West and Latin America was widening. The dependence of Latin American countries and their constant robbery by old and new metropolises led to their chronic underdevelopment compared with many other states, and this became fully evident in the twentieth century. Under these conditions, the idea of uniting Latin American countries in order to protect their national interests by limiting the influence of Europe and the United States began to be introduced in practice.
Latin American cultures are united by some other factors influencing their development and determining their unity and specificity. The natural factor is one of them, because it initially influenced the formation of the characteristic features of the Latin American civilizational consciousness.
The people of Latin America have lived for centuries in open hostility with nature. Plants and animals constantly invaded their settlements. The nature of Latin America is constantly changing, it is as if it is waiting for man.” The character and worldview of man, forced to interact with such nature, to live in it, are formed in a certain way, have their own specifics. Native inhabitants, having adapted to the difficulties associated with natural conditions, did not enter into hostile conflict with them. The numerous settlers, not only Europeans, but also Africans in the process of difficult and painful adaptation to new conditions of life experienced a psychological shock when faced with the difficulties of mastering a different nature, which was for them variable and unfamiliar. The disruption of the continuity of traditions in relations with nature could not but affect the psychological makeup of the people, which survived in various forms of mobile psyche among the descendants of the Spanish conquistadors and Africans. It should be noted that this is not the case with the Indians, who have their own historically established relationship with native nature.
In Latin America there are different ways of solving the man-nature problem. On the one hand, in the course of the civilization process there was a tendency to subjugate to natural rhythms among the Amerindian peasants, but also among other ethno-cultural communities, especially among the mestizos living in such natural zones as the Andes-Cordilleras and the tropical jungle.