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In regards to your original essay, I sent the link to someone and she sent this note back to me, about an interesting book:

There's an elderly gentleman and a journalist in Montevideo, Uruguyay, who thought he had an answer for your question. I read his book "The Open Veins Of Latin America" decades ago and was duly impressed, as many others have been by Eduardo Galeano's essay on sociopolitical and historical background to the poverty and "arrested development" (his term for it) of Latin America.

The problem with the book is that it was written by a Marxist and you have to be able to wade through a flood of political terminology pertaining that time period and ideology. The book doesn't have all the answers, of course, but it gives you a fairly good grasp of the reasons that made Latin America poor and North America rich. (Historical, political, administrative, economical, religious, geographical etc.) A good read and very interesting, whatever your political persuation may be.