This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

In the opening sentence of “the cruel redeemer Lazarus Morell”, Jorge Luis Borges, ever the master of the breviloquent narrative, summarised the plight of the Americas: 

In 1517, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, feeling great pity for the Indians who grew worn and lean in the drudging infernos of the Antillean gold mines, proposed to Emperor Charles V that Negroes be brought to the isles of the Caribbean, so that they might grow worn and lean in the drudging infernos of the Antillean gold mines.

For the Argentine man of letters, this barbarous crime was the “remote cause”: the terminus a quo that bound North and South America together. This trauma, however, continues unabated. Currently Latin America and the Caribbean accounts for a third of the world’s murders despite having just eight per cent of its population.

That Latin America was born in “fire and blood”, the result of conquest and slavery, is well enough known, even if the historical detail for many people remains hazy. The region continues to attract the lazy adjective “forgotten”, though its cultural proximity to Europe — the French political analyst, Alain Rouquié, defined it as the “Far West” — may account for the ignorance. 

In Patria: Lost Countries of South America, Laurence Blair, a writer based in Paraguay, has sought to re-examine the heritage of the “650 million souls between the southern US border and the tip of Patagonia [that] have to fight for the world’s attention”. Unlike many of the valiant, but often ponderous, efforts at creating a cohesive narrative out of so disparate a continent, Blair offers a new history of South America that is both energetic and scholarly. He attempts to connect past to present, focusing on nations “dreamed-up, dismembered or disappeared altogether” — ones that cannot be found on any map.

Divided into three parts — “Resistance”, “Rebellion” and “Revolution” — the nine discrete chapters each cover a lesser-known aspect of the continent’s history. Though Blair takes the reader from the depths of Chile to the Darién Gap, much of his emphasis is subequatorial. The reason for this may lie in the narrative device of blending reportage and history (in his acknowledgements, an apology is made for not having the time or resources to provide more material from Colombia, Ecuador, Uruguay, the Guianas and Venezuela). However, Blair is an engaging and knowledgeable guide, and his detours, if at times distracting, are worth the price of this historical journey.

In southern Peru, we are introduced to the Chincha, who transformed what had been a coastal desert into a “fertile paradise” through the cultivation of guano (which would precipitate a commodity boom and bust in the nineteenth century). The Chincha lord possessed a navy of some 100,000 vessels, the largest in the pre-Columbian era. By 1570, however, political machination coupled with a lack of immunity to Eurasian diseases had destroyed a kingdom. As one observer pitilessly observed, this was the “secret judgements of God”. The “Great Dying” would claim 90 per cent of the pre-Columbian population, some 55 million Indigenous Americans.

Blair’s search for the Diaguita — an Indigenous confederation native to what is now northern Chile and Argentina — is a beguiling one of “dead ends and retraced steps”. The Calchaqí Diaguita, unlike their Chilean kinsfolk, managed to delay Spanish rule for 130 years until 1666 with such tenacity that it was feared that Spain might be driven from the continent. 

There is also the piecing together of Afro-Argentinian history — by 1800, Africans and Afrodescendants comprised a third of Buenos Aires’ population, putting paid to the country’s exceptionalist narrative based on its whiteness. Even in 2021, the Argentinian president Alberto Fernández misquoted Octavio Paz’s ironic maxim when he told a press conference: “The Mexicans came from the Indians, the Brazilians came out of the jungle, but we Argentines came from boats, and they were boats that came from Europe.”

Neighbouring Paraguay, a country on which Blair is especially astute, is the “perfect transit country” with its permeable borders and weak state. He reveals a country still “marked in fire and ash”, a legacy of the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-70), in which two-thirds of the population and 90 per cent of its men perished and later General Stroessner.

At the heart of the book, though it has no chapter of its own, is Simón Bolívar’s dream of a “united Latin American superpower”, the patria grande. Taking his lead from Constantine the Great, the Venezuelan Libertador imagined Panama as the “the capital of the earth”. But as with most dreams, this Latin American one was always likely to evaporate on waking. Continental integration remains a fantasy, especially when the ties that bind it seem to be so cruel.