It's so easy to make fun of you because you're so nice. And so I tease you and then you're like, oh, thanks for noticing that we exist. It's my pleasure. Anyway, this is pretty remarkable, especially when you consider that most of this territory had been under Spanish or Portuguese control for almost 300 years. The most revolutionary thing about these independence movements were that they enshrined the idea of so-called popular sovereignty in the New World. Never again would Latin America be under the permanent control of a European power, and the relatively quick division of Latin America into individual states, despite Bolivar's pan-South American dream, showed how quickly the people in these regions developed a sense of themselves as nations distinct from Europe and from each other. This division into nation-states prefigures what would happen to Europe in the mid-19th century, and in that sense, Latin America is the leader of 19th century world history.