The Latin American mystery

Abstract

Latin America is a concept, an intellectual construct that attempts to account for a group of national states, different in their composition but with a stable core, the former Spanish and Portuguese colonies on the american continent. Today there is no alternative national development program in Latin America but the global capitalist integration to the world. National experiences conducted by leftist governements do not constitute an image as the one Cuba represented  in the sixties, neither from itrs programs nos from their leadership. What was built in the decades of the fifties and sixties was an awareness of the importance of a continental project that deserved to be supported by a theorization of its totality, the elaboration of an object of knowledge and at the same time a collective political actor. Either way, this awareness was developed around the international insitutions and national residents in Santiago de Chile and began to fade along with the project of Allende and the Unidad Popular.