Latin American integration

The integration of Latin America has a history going back to Spanish American and Brazilian independence, when there was discussion of creating a regional state or confederation of Latin American nations to protect the area's newly won autonomy. After several projects failed, the issue was not taken up again until the late nineteenth century, but now centered on the issue of international trade and with a sense of Pan-Americanism due to the United States of America taking a leading role in the project. The idea of granting these organizations a primarily political purpose did not become prominent again until the post-World War II period, which saw both the start of the Cold War and a climate of international cooperation that led to the creation of institutions such as the United Nations. It would not be until the mid-twentieth century that uniquely Latin American organizations were created.

At the end of the wars of independence (1808–1825), many new sovereign states emerged in the Americas from the former Spanish colonies. The South American independence leader Simón Bolívar envisioned various unions that would ensure the independence of Spanish America vis-à-vis the European powers—in particular Britain—and the expanding United States. Already in his 1815 Cartagena Manifesto, Bolívar advocated that the Spanish American provinces should present a united front to the Spanish in order to prevent their being re-conquered piecemeal, though he did not yet propose a political union of any kind. During the wars of independence, the fight against Spain was marked by only an incipient sense of nationalism. It was unclear what the new states that replaced the Spanish Monarchy should be. Most of those who fought for independence identified with both their birth provinces and Spanish America as a whole, both of which they referred to as their patria, a term which incorporates meanings contained today in the English words "fatherland" and "homeland."

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