Social democracy in Latin America

Latin America broadly refers to the countries in the Americas (including the Caribbean) whose national language is derived from Latin. These include countries where the languages of Spanish Portuguese and French are spoken. Latin America is therefore a historical term rooted in the colonial era when these languages were introduced to the area by their respective European colonizers. The term itself however was not coined until the nineteenth century when Argentinean jurist Carlos Calvo and French engineer Michel Chevalier in reference to the Napoleonic invasion of Mexico in 1862 used the term “Latin” to denote difference from the “Anglo-Saxon” people of North America (Jimenez 2017). It gained currency during the twentieth century when Mesoamerican Central American Caribbean and South American countries sought to culturally distance themselves from North America and more specifically from the United States.