The Requerimiento was one of the most striking legal documents of the entire age of European overseas expansion. A long line of publicists and scholars from Bartholomew de Las Casas to Lewis Hanke have discussed, praised and condemned it. The Requerimiento appears to illustrate more clearly than any other single document the combination of high-sounding motives, legal chicanery and brute force that made the Spanish conquest of the Americas possible. In recent years, there has been increasing emphasis upon examining the conquest in terms of the brute force involved and a decreasing emphasis upon the motives and the legalisms which the Spanish employed. As one scholar has said, the Requerimiento was but a “useless legalism,” and, presumably, no longer worthy of serious attention. In addition, scholars have generally agreed that the Requerimiento is thoroughly understood. Following Las Casas, they have asserted that it contained the legal opinion of the thirteenth century canon lawyer known as Hostiensis that infidels had no right to property or political jurisdiction. In medieval terms, that infidels, such as the inhabitants of the Americas, did not possess dominium. In recent years, scholars have asserted that those who defended the Indians against the conquerors, such as Las Casas himself and Francisco Vitoria, drew upon the opinion of Hostiensis' teacher, the canonist-Pope Innocent IV. In this way, the Requerimiento and the related debate about the rights of the Indians has been placed within its proper position within the late medieval canonistic tradition.

The course taken by Fidel Castro's revolution brought it into early conflict with certain of the principles that were most deeply engraved in the Charter of the Organization of American States. Political organization of the member states “… on the basis of the effective exercise of representative democracy” and strict adherence to the non-intervention commitment were proclaimed as cardinal elements of the inter-American structure that had been created since World War II. Even though such noble ideals were not by any means fully realized by all the members, Castro's early sponsorship of interventionist activities and the moves he quickly made toward creation of a dictatorship—some said an increasingly communistic one—seemed to mark a new and more virulent challenge to the convivencia interatnericana than it had previously encountered. Whatever his reasons—and they will be long disputed—Castro had by 1961 brought his revolution gradually but decisively into dependence upon and, in effect, alliance with the Soviet Union, and that seemed to many to constitute precisely the kind of challenge the inter-American system had been designed to meet.

The statue of the Christ of the Andes commemorates the termination of a sixty-year boundary controversy that on several occasions brought Argentina and Chile to the brink of war. The dispute amicably resolved by King Edward VII of England in 1902 grew out of the Treaty of 1881, in which the two nations agreed for the first time on the boundaries in Patagonia, and in the Straits of Magellan and Tierra del Fuego, that we take for granted today. The dispute that preceded the Treaty of 1881 was long and bitter. For although Patagonia and the adjacent areas were without question possessions of the Spanish crown, official neglect throughout the colonial period had denied to either successor state a clear title over them based on uti possidetis.

The revolution of 1904 was the major political disturbance in Paraguay for thirty years after the revolt of 1873-1874 which succeeded in driving the Liberals from power. Although not formally organized as a political party until 1887, young Liberals succeeded in gaining a brief, precarious ascendancy in postwar Paraguay. They dominated the Constituent Assembly when it met in 1870 to draft a constitution. This assembly elected Juan Bautista Rivarola, the surviving member of the postwar Triumvirate, as provisional president. But the young Liberals distrusted Rivarola and the conservatives, whose acknowledged leader was Cándido Bareiro, a nephew of Francisco Solano López who had served the dictator as a diplomat in Europe. The Liberals executed the first postwar political coup in Paraguay when they succeeded in substituting Facundo Machaín in place of Rivarola for a few hours until Bareiro directed a conservative coup that restored Rivarola as President of Paraguay. Bareiro expected to be elected president in the 1870 elections but Rivarola's position as provisional president gave him the advantage and he won the election.