In the introduction to his 1845 biography, Facundo, Domingo Sarmiento characterized the future of Argentina as ‘una lucha […] entre los últimos progresos del espíritu humano y los rudimentos de la vida salvaje, entre las ciudades populosas y los bosques sombríos’. This view of South America as an epic struggle between civilization and barbarism – a barbarism which finds its fullest expression in ‘los bosques sombríos’ – reinvigorated a motif that can be traced from the very beginnings of Spanish-American literature in the early modern chronicle, which regarded the Spanish colonization of the New World as a battle between culture and nature, Christianity and paganism. It also anticipated a debate which was to reach fruition in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries regarding Latin America's destiny as a ‘continente enfermo’ (the title of a 1899 pamphlet by the Venezuelan César Zumeta) – a land enervated by its ‘unhealthy’ ethnic and telluric make-up. This debate often focused on climate, particularly on the influence of the tropics on health and national prosperity.