The term was made up to remark that Latin America is closer to France than to other countries like England and USA. From Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wi

The term was made up to remark that Latin America is closer to France than to other countries like England and USA. From Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_America#Etymology_and_definitions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_America#Etymology_and_def... ): The idea that a part of the Americas has a linguistic affinity with the Romance cultures as a whole can be traced back to the 1830s, in the writing of the French Saint-Simonian Michel Chevalier, who postulated that this part of the Americas was inhabited by people of a "Latin race", and that it could, therefore, ally itself with "Latin Europe" in a struggle with "Teutonic Europe", "Anglo-Saxon America" and "Slavic Europe".[8] The idea was later taken up by Latin American intellectuals and political leaders of the mid- and late-nineteenth century, who no longer looked to Spain or Portugal as cultural models, but rather to France.[9] The term was first used in Paris in an 1856 conference by the Chilean politician Francisco Bilbao[10] and the same year by the Colombian writer José María Torres Caicedo in his poem "Two Americas".[11] The term Latin America was supported by the French Empire of Napoleon III during the French invasion of Mexico as a way to include France among countries with influence in the Americas and to exclude Anglophone countries and played a role in his campaign to imply cultural kinship of the region with France, transform France into a cultural and political leader of the area, and install Maximilian of Habsburg as emperor of the Second Mexican Empire.[12] This term was also used in 1861 by French scholars in La revue des races Latines, a magazine dedicated to the Pan-Latinism movement.[13]