ABSTRACT
Stretching from Mexico and the sunny beaches of the Caribbean Sea to the towering Andes and the vast forests of the Amazon basin to the windswept Tierra del Fuego, Latin America and the Caribbean region house a growing population of nearly half a billion people. Of all the world’s developing regions, this one is perhaps the most resource rich, endowed with large mineral and oil reserves, abundant sources of water, the world’s largest expanse of tropical forest, and vast areas of fertile soil. Latin Americans have the longest life expectancy and the lowest child mortality of any developing region, and most Latin American countries are already urbanized, with three-quarters of the populous living in cities—about the same proportion as in western Europe.
