*Latin America takes its name today from its earliest European explorers and settlers, the Spanish and Portuguese (who speak Romance languages), but it was originally inhabited by American Indians.

*American Indians are thought to have migrated from Asia about 12,000 years ago, and to have reached South America by about 6,000 BC, although no-one is certain, and a few archaeological findings suggest people may have been in South America 20,000 years ago.

*The American Indians in Central and South America, unlike those of North America, created several large and powerful empires prior to the arrival of Columbus in 1492(the pre-Columbian period).

*Southern Mexico and Central America were dominated by the Maya, who had a network of independent city-states that covered the Yucatan and much of southern Central America between 250 AD and about 900 AD, when, for reasons yet unknown (possibly warfare, possibly drought, possibly soil depletion), they abandoned many of their cities, including all those in the southern part of their lands.  Some northern Mayan cities survived longer, but often made war on one another, with a particularly destructive rebellion in 1450, and the Mayan culture was very weak when the Spanish finally arrived (although many Mayan people remain in Mexico, and many still speak Mayan languages).  Like many pre-Columbian Indian nations, the Mayans practised human sacrifice.

*The Aztecs were the dominant empire of what is now southern central Mexico, with their capital at what is now Mexico City.  Beginning around 1300, they began to conquer and subdue their neighbours, eventually conquering a large empire, in part because their religion required frequent human sacrifice, and people often preferred to sacrifice prisoners of war rather than local people.  They had a highly hierarchical society with a rigid class structure and a powerful military.  When the Spanish arrived, they were initially welcomed as possible gods or emissaries of the god Quetzalcoatl.  In 1521, the Spanish, under Hernando Cortez, arrived, allied with a subject tribe that wanted to be free of their Aztec rulers, took over Tenochtitlan, and made war with their guns against bows and arrows.  They also brought smallpox, which the Indians had never encountered, and to which they had no immunity—throughout the Americas, between 30 and 90% of all the Indians died of European diseases).  The Aztecs were rapidly defeated.

*The Aztecs, incidentally, introduced the Spanish (and thus Europe) to corn, the tomato, and chocolate.

*The major empire of South America was that of the Inca, in the Andes, in what is now Peru, and parts of Bolivia, Chile, and Ecuador.  The Inca domesticated the llama, built roads across their Empire, created impressive irrigation systems, and built a vast empire while peacefully assimilating the empires around them.  They did this partly through the mita system of taxation which required labour rather than money be paid.  However, the empire did not last long.  It was created in 1438, and continually expanded, in part because Inca religious practises required that while a dead emperor’s oldest son got the title of emperor, all the wealth from the dead emperor’s lands went to the other descendents to take care of them and to take care of their father in the afterlife, so the new emperor had to expand the kingdom to get his own land for wealth.  The Inca also offered human sacrifices, although not as much as the Aztec did.  The Inca were conquered by Francisco Pizarro in 1532.  Legend has it that the Inca cursed their old capital of Cuzco, so that the Spanish could not have children there.  This is why the capital was moved to Lima.  There may be some truth to this—Cuzco is not on the altiplano, but it is close, and is very high, and the lower oxygen results in lower birth rates in general, especially in those unaccustomed to it (like Europeans).  The Spanish took the place of the Inca emperors for most of the Empire, and kept the mita system in place for their own use.  The Catholic Church used the main Incan languages (Quechua and Aymara) to spread the gospel in South America, and this is one reason that some Incan languages survive today.