Our Regional Perspectives on Power series continues this week with a region that has often been considered geopolitically unimportant. If the prosperity-driven rise of the United States has made North America the world’s most important region, as we saw last week, the persistent effects of poverty, inequality and under-development have consigned South America to a less flattering fate. While independence from Spain and Portugal came in auspicious circumstances, today not one South American country unambiguously qualifies as a developed nation. Argentina was once the richest country in the world, but has systematically squandered its advantages. Brazil, so the saying goes, is the country of the future – and always will be.

The obvious questions here are: where has South America gone wrong? And why have countries in other regions managed to achieve the results that South American countries have aspired to for so long? Within South America, answers to these questions have repeatedly emphasized the role of foreign intervention (read: exploitation) – first by Europe and then by the United States. A leading proponent of such explanations is the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, whose book The Open Veins of Latin America we consider on Monday.

Whether foreign influence has been decisive in or not, it seems evident that China is supplanting the United States as the key external actor in South America (as in other areas of the international system). On Tuesday we compare the regional influence of these two powers with the efforts of South Americans states to define the “post-American hemisphere” through regional integration initiatives such as the Union of South American Nations. Another post- (or even anti-)American approach is embodied by the so-called Bolivarian Movement, led by the ailing Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, which we consider on Wednesday. On Thursday we explore the less heralded alternative suggested by recent signs of a new ‘grand alliance’ between Brazil and Colombia, before concluding on Friday with a meditation on Brazil’s prospects for becoming a bona fide world power and what implications that may have for South America as a whole.