Argentina

Argentina, officially the Argentine Republic, fills the far south of South America, the second country of the continent and the eighth of the world, sharing the Southern Cone with Chile and bordering Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil and Uruguay. It is a federal state of twenty-three provinces with the autonomous city of Buenos Aires as capital and greatest port. The land knew Paleolithic hunters and the southern reach of the Inca before Spain planted its cities in the sixteenth century and ruled the south through the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, founded in 1776. The May Revolution of 1810 opened the War of Independence, and the congress at Tucumán declared independence on 9 July 1816 under the sword of San Martín. Freedom was followed by long civil strife between Buenos Aires centralists and provincial federalists until the modern republic settled. Late in the nineteenth century millions of European immigrants worked the pampas into one of the richest farm belts on earth, and beef and wheat made Argentina wealthy. Neutral through most of the Second World War, it declared against the Axis only in March 1945.