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Rustic wooden table filled with ingredient for preparing homemade chocolate truffles.

Featured

History of Chocolate

Who Invented Chocolate? Chocolate is made from the fruit of cacao trees, which are native to Central and South America. The fruits are called pods and each pod contains around 40 cacao beans. The beans are dried and roasted to create cocoa beans. It’s unclear exactly when cacao came on the scene or who invented […]

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Aerial view of the Spider (46 meters long) at Nazca Lines, some 435 km south of Lima, Peru on December 11, 2014. Geoglyphs can be seen only from atop the surrounding foothills or from aircrafts. The purpose of the Nazca lines remains unclear, according some scientists the Nazca people created them to be seen by their gods in the sky.

Nazca Lines

What Are the Nazca Lines? There are three basic types of Nazca Lines: straight lines, geometric designs and pictorial representations. There are more than 800 straight lines on the coastal plain, some of which are 30 miles (48 km) long. Additionally, there are over 300 geometric designs, which include basic shapes such as triangles, rectangles, […]

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Machu Picchu, Peru's most important tourist destination. Built most probably by Inca Chapacutec in the 15th century.

Machu Picchu

Machu Picchu’s Inca Past Historians believe Machu Picchu was built at the height of the Inca Empire, which dominated western South America in the 15th and 16th centuries. It was abandoned an estimated 100 years after its construction, probably around the time the Spanish began their conquest of the mighty pre-Columbian civilization in the 1530s. […]

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Vasco Núñez de Balboa. Found in the collection of Museo Naval de Madrid. Artist: Anonymous.

Vasco Núñez de Balboa

Early Life and Career  Balboa was born in 1475 in Jerez de los Caballeros, a town in the impoverished Extremadura region of Spain. His father was believed to be a nobleman, but the family was not wealthy; like many of his class, Balboa decided to seek his fortune in the New World. Around 1500, he […]

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Stories


Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in his cell at Djalameh jail, 1961

Featured

The 7 Most Notorious Nazis Who Escaped to South America

In some cases, it took four or five decades to bring them to justice.

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A map (by Alvin Jewett Johnson) shows Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uraguay, 1862.

How Did Thousands of Former Confederates End up in Brazil?

In the years after the Civil War ended, thousands of defiant and disillusioned Confederates fled Reconstruction-era Dixie and headed even farther south to Latin America. Some settled in Mexico and Venezuela, but the lion’s share sailed for Brazil, a former Confederate ally and one of the few countries in the Americas where slavery was still […]

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This Day in History

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2010

Chilean miners are rescued after 69 days underground

Latin American History
1982

Falklands War ends

Latin American History
1997

Peruvian President Fujimori orders assault on Japanese ambassador’s home

South American History
1500

First European explorer reaches Brazil

Exploration
1985

The eruption of Nevado del Ruiz

Natural Disasters & Environment
1946

Juan Perón elected in Argentina

Latin American History
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