  We present a statistical overview of the publications in theoretical high
energy physics (HEP), which emerged in Latin America (LA) in the period from
1990 to 2012. Our study captures the eight Latin American nations, which are
dominant in this field of research: Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Colombia,
Venezuela, Uruguay and Cuba. As an intercontinental benchmark, we compare them
with India, Canada, South Korea, Belgium and South Africa. We consider the
productivity of research papers in specialized high-impact journals, and the
corresponding numbers of citations. The goal is to document the efforts in LA
to catch up with the most wealthy countries, in a field of research without
direct practical benefits. The restriction to theoretical HEP excludes large
international collaborations, which enables a fair evaluation of national
achievements. We further investigate how these records are correlated with
three socio-economic indices: the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the Human
Development Index (HDI) and the Education Index (EI). Despite some progress,
there remains a backlog of LA compared to the dominant countries, which cannot
be explained solely by economic deficiency. In general, a detailed correlation
between the socio-economic and scientific evolution is not obvious.
