The Dutch controlled large parts of Brazil throughout the 1640s and 1650s, the French had substantial settlements in present-day Guiana and attempted to claim parts of Brazil as &quot;France Antartique,&quot; and the English had a number of failed colonies in Amazonia and the Rio de la Plata as well. Heck, even the Scottish attempted to settle a colony in the Darien in present-day Panama. And that&#x27;s not even including all the buccaneers and slave traders of various nationalities. I&#x27;m not interested in wading into the parent discussion, but just wanted to point out that colonialism in Central and South America really was a pan-European phenomenon.<p>Edit: also worth pointing out that the Spanish monarchs for the period we&#x27;re talking about were the House of Hapsburg and hence claimed extensive territories in what&#x27;s now Germany, Austria and Holland, so even many land-locked European regions were involved. There are a surprising number of Iberianized German names in colonial documents from Latin America.<p>Bizarrely, there was even a minuscule colonial empire ruled by a tiny vassal state of Polish-Lithuanian common wealth for awhile: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Duchy_of_Courland_and_Semigallia#Colonization" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Duchy_of_Courland_and_Semigall...</a>