After four centuries of secluded life under different empires that ignored their wishes, ransacked their properties and bent their way of free will, they emerge today in the light of a new centruy ruled by innovation.

The path from order to chaos finds Latin American countries decidedly focused on c omplexity, which is directly leading them to design their own innovating strategy.

Where is Latinity born?

This noun that ended up becoming an adjective is born from the hands of the Colombian poet José María Torres Caicedo, who in a trip to Venice, on September 26, 1856, presents his poem entitled "The two Americas".

North and South trus remain clearly exposed as the final ends of a bipolar continent, defined in the North by an Anglo-Saxon culture and from New Mexico down to the South by the conquest carried out by the Iberian Peninsula.

"Those people born to make an alliance: the union is their duty, to love each other law: they have the same origin and the same mission". With these words the poem by Caicedo inaugurates not only a new word but also a new geographical area.

Languages do not matter, neither the origins do. Each individual living from 30 degrees in the North latitude up to 60 degrees in the South latitude and from 30 degrees in the West latitude up to 120 degrees in the East has left his individuality definitely behind to become a component of Latinity.

It is the most extended area in the world that lodges more than 550 human beings that talk the same language, feel the same way and seek answers to the same problems. Four centuries of European dominance left its mark to generate a future exclusively as supplier of raw materials but never as creator, as supplier of food but never of creativity, as source of men to fill a war front in far away corners of the planet but never as intellectuals worth mentioning.

Edgar Morin, one of the most remarkable live philosophers that has studied complex systems with the vision of an earnest researcher of the Latin American reality, explains the origin of this outstanding group of citizens from the Americas.

A crusade that begins in the Mediterranean basin where the civilizations of the Greek world merge with their Roman conquerors, where the defeated Greece ends up beating its barbarian conqueror instilling in it its entire creative and cultural background.

But, as Morin states, the Mediterranean culture was not only Greek and Roman. It also included principles from other cultural patterns. Asia Minor and North Africa contributed different ideals that amalgamated to create something new. San Agustín himself was a Berber born at Tagaste in the North of Africa, a follower of Manicheism and later consecrated as one of the four doctors of the Christian Church of Rome.

The seven centuries of Arabian life in the Iberian Peninsula left their transcendental mark and their departure from the peninsula also coincides with the arrival of the first conquerors in America. Because the history of Spain recognizes that it went from the hands of the natives to the Carthaginians, from the Carthaginians to the Romans, from the Romans to the Visigoths, and from the Visigoths to the Arabs and the Moors.

Towards the year 718, Tariq ibn Ziyad and other Arabs from the North of Africa finished the conquest of the South of the Peninsula. They contributed innovations in the language, the culture, the food and the architecture, all of which, packed in what we call today the conquest of America by the Mediterranean, generated this special current of beings that dwell in this hemi-continent, which is different for its biodiversity, creative for the mix of cultures and innovating because those who reached its shores did so due to the need to remain alive, after the auto-da-fé and of the "purity of the blood" that the kings of Spain introduced with the Inquisition in 1481.

This gave rise to a population rich in intellectuality but poor in freedoms. The gold and the silver of our American guts were the main purpose of the Europeans that came to our lands.

And all those who came with a constructive spirit had to gather with the aboriginal cultures, which in many cases were superior to the cultures of the conquerors themselves. The Aztecs, Toltecs, Mayas, Incas, Tiwanakus, fell under the European steel and thus understood the need to innovate in order to survive.

They exchanged their lives for their freedoms and in this scenario there arose what are today 550 million citizens governed by vital principles that are until today unknown in the North hemisphere: tolerance, anti-fanaticism, non-warmongering, opening to the religions and on top of it all a huge acceptance of the "other". Because we understood that for "the other" we are "otehr" too.

This recognition of the other gave us the possibility of associating in order to innovate, respecting the being that is on our side. Respect in the largest sense of this term. This explains why wars did not start in this part of the planet and why the large corporate frauds did not take place in our lands.

And today we suffer what we call the global financial crisis, which is no other than disguising big swindels with carnival garments so that the party may go on.

While in the North they reduce the entire human activity to the variables of an equation and to the values from a gross product that few know what it includes, in the South, our people prioritize the value of the human Being above any other variable. Because that mix that took place with Arabs and Toltecs, with Visigoths and Araucans, with Greeks and Mayas, produced the genetic characteristics that no scientific could have attained in a laboratory.

Therefor, after four centuries of conquests, the Latinities, which are not a single one but all those that one way or the other differentiate among them, are celebrating.

We come with our creativity and our innovation to rescue the heritage of Manco Capac in the Cuzco, the rites of the Chichen Itza of the Mayas. And also to do justice to the treacherous death of Moctezuma in the hands of Cortés, to understand the quetzalcóatl with its extraordinary diversity from what flies and what crawls and the complex entirety of that holistic whole, which is the human Being.

We thank our ancestors for having reached these privileged shores and we are committed to this fantastic task of giving new answers to old questions and creating among all a new sense for our lives.

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