Why the US Got Rich But Latin America Never Did

Three hundred years ago, the south of the Americas looked like the winner. It had the Aztec and Inca empires, the richest silver mountain on Earth and a university in Mexico City almost a century before Harvard. Today the average American earns about eight times as much as the average Latin American. So what happened?

In this video we follow the whole story on the map: a town split in two by the US and Mexico border, the geography that made one half cheap to connect and the other expensive, the silver that flowed straight out to Seville, the land that went to millions of families in the north and a few families in the south, the empire that broke into eighteen countries, the nine days that cost Mexico California, a century of booms and busts, and why the gap is not written in stone.