I saw this headline just today: Opportunities Abound in Latin and South America.
OK, maybe the idea of abundant opportunities in Latin is sufficiently absurd that I should dismiss it. Still, the headline is confusing. Latin America includes all of South America with the exclusion of Guyana (English) and Suriname (Dutch).
The only legitimate reason to add South America to Latin America would be to include Guyana and Suriname. Yet the article makes no mention of these countries specifically, and mentions several Latin American countries. Actually, it focuses only on Spanish-speaking Latin America.
But back to grammar. Assuming they want to say what they said I would probably use Americas in the plural for any time I was mentioning multiple Americas with ellipsis.
Am I spitting in the wind?
Glenn,
I don't know if you are spitting in the wind, but finding grammatical/meaning errors in headlines has been done for years.
Emmett
Splitting hairs (or is it hares?), but maybe they were intending to exclude Belize. Belize is in Central America (part of North America), so it's not in South America and the people are English-speaking. 😉
I understand Latin America to be all the continental nations of the Americas south of the US in which Spanish, Portuguese, or French is the principal language. I do not believe that any island nation is included. I suspect that whoever wrote the headline considers Latin America to be Central America – I've encountered that usage before, though not from historians, geographers, or news writers.
Peter
In a different vein, it's interesting when the choices in polls are White, Black or Latino. A Latino could be anything. A person born in a Latin American country who has 4 German grandparents could be a Latino.