ABSTRACT
Do Latin American borders exist? This provocative question can be useful to make my point and introduce the argument of this text. Of course, Latin American countries emerged as modern nation states endowed with borders, which began to be traced as international limits, first with the separation of the two Iberian empires and then with the nineteenth-century decolonization process. Remarkably, however, territory does not play the same role in the “Extreme Occident” (Rouquié 1987), which this part of the Americas represents, as in the old Western world. Indeed, if territory building chronologically represents the first step of stato-genesis (nation-building only came thereafter, once the borders had been drawn on maps), after a very nationalist nineteenth century, borderlands were soon evacuated of spatial imaginaries. This is partly due to the fact that they lay in scarcely populated regions where the detail of their demarcation was of no essential interest to the capital and they rather appeared as frontiers, full of opportunities (Perrier Bruslé 2007). We will come back to the legacy of this regional history which does not exclude violence and war in the process of boundary-making, but which conditions border narratives, offering Latin American borders an exceptional status.
