The Encyclopedia examines urgent contemporary issues like economic and population growth, trade and international debt, tourism and the environment, as well as the long-term factors that have moulded Latin America as we find it today: the native flora and fauna, the emergence of early civilisations in Mexico and Peru, imperial domination over three centuries by Spain and Portugal, the struggle for independence in the nineteenth century, and the political turbulence of the twentieth. Coverage is provided also of music and literature, architecture, painting, and intellectual life, vividly reminding us that beyond today's headlines lies the culture of the tango and the samba, Borges and Neruda, Garcia Marquez and Diego Rivera, Villa Lobos and Bob Marley.