Patria by Laurence Blair: 5-star review

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It wouldn’t be the first time South America upended world affairs. The “Great Dying”, in which European diseases ravaged indigenous peoples who had no immunity to them throughout the 1500s – a holocaust comparable only to the Black Death – cooled the global climate, as swathes of farmland were abandoned and later reclaimed by forest. Famines, disease and civil war followed in Europe. South America has already changed the world, even if the world failed to notice.

Yet the sheer numbers are already challenging this “continent-sized gap” in our collective consciousness. In 2023, the US Border Patrol apprehended a record 2.4 million at the south-west border trying to cross in North America; by 2050, a quarter of the population of the United States will be Hispanic. The 12 sovereign states of South America contain nearly more people than the combined populations of the United States, Australia and Britain combined. But they still struggle for recognition: as Blair observes, “the 250,000 people of Latin American descent who live in the UK have no option but to tick the box marked ‘Other.’”

Romantic, adventurous and thrilling, Patria achieves something remarkable. Not only does Blair bring the stink and splendour of these “forgotten nations” to pungent life, but he also forces us to consider how, and why, they came to be lost in the first place. His travels deserve their own TV series. And his book’s import deserves a wide hearing – that to ignore South America’s past is to ignore the planet’s future.

Patria is published by Bodley Head at £25. To order your copy for £19.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books

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Patria by Laurence Blair: 5-star review

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