25 Critical Events in the History of South America

1. European Invasion and the Subsequent Indian Genocide (includes the campaigns of Pizzaro)
2. Creation of the vast Inca Empire
3. Creation of Chibcha Empire
4. Conversion of Indigenous South American population to Catholicism
5. The Anti-Spanish Rebellions of Bolivar and San Martin
6. The Granting of Independence to the South American countries in the 1820s and 1830s
7. Discovery of tin and silver deposits in South America
8. Pope divides South America between the Spanish and the Portuguese
9. Don Pedro II becomes King of Brazil
10. Bernardo O’ Higgins rebels in Chile against the Spanish
11. Black Slaves arrive in Brazil to work on the plantations
12. The Chaco War
13. Beginning of the modern Deforestation of the Amazon
14. Period of Juan Peron’s rule in Argentina
15. Period of the Vargas dictatorship in Brazil
16. Splitting off of Panama from Columbia to create the Panama Canal
17. Discovery of Oil in Venezuela
18. Formation of the MERCOSUR trading group
19. British attack Buenos Aires in the 19th century
20. The Period of the Dirty Wars in Argentina
21. The Falkland War and the Collapse of the Ruling Junta in Argentina
22. The Collapse of the Pinochet Regime in Chile in the 1990s
23. The South American Foreign Debt crisis
24. Collapse of the Stroessner Regime in Paraguay in the late 1980s
25. Menem introduces Fiscal conservatism into the Argentinian economy