Was there a ‘Scramble for South America’ like there was a ‘Scramble for Africa’?

I am not sure that I would think of it in the same way as the partition, but, to be honest, I have never considered the parallels. I would actually characterize the South American colonial boom as a delayed response by both Iberian imperial camps. Columbus finds the South American mainland on his third voyage in 1498, but he is too involved in the Caribbean project to redirect resources from an already unsteady beginning in those islands. Portuguese explorer Cabral began to make contact with indigenous groups on what is now the Brazilian coast two years later. Like Columbus, the Portuguese authorities were content on knowing that a landmass south of the Caribbean was there but did engage in larger operations on the coast for more than twenty years. If you think of the "Conquest" as a business it makes more sense. Portugal had more resources and manpower invested in African and Asian interests than to quickly jump to an American project. The same could be said for the Spanish settlements in the Caribbean. In order to establish a system that would allow for their eventual "island hopping" scheme of conquest, they had to set a foundation (political, social, economic) on Española and the surrounding islands. They are dated, but I continue to refer to Sauer's The Early Spanish Main and Boxer's The Portuguese Seaborne Empire for this period.

After nearly two decades, those foundations and resources allowed for both entities to consider South America with greater interest. The Portuguese were operating under the assumption that the land was larger than they had originally believed. By 1530, European raiders, entrepreneurs, and small-scale merchants had done considerable work in charting the Brazilian coast and the peoples that populated the land. The Spanish were not as thorough in their mapping projects. In roughly the same time Spanish maps were not clear on whether South America was a continent or a collection of large islands. Early Spanish settlement near the Gulf of Venezuela was sending reports to authorities in Santo Domingo about the status of "las islas" and the Pacific waterway that no doubt began at the mouth of Maracaibo. (See Ramos-Pérez, Ampies y Coro) Still, the Spanish Crown was willing to invest in these areas without significant evidence to warrant some of their efforts. Cursory understandings of the western and northern South American coast was encouraging to European investors. The Spanish Crown permitted German-speaking merchant houses to begin their own merchant activities in what is now Venezuela and southern Peru/northern Bolivia. While the Welser Company was able to set up a base of operations in Venezuela, the Fugger Company never began its own settlement project. The Fugger territory included the land that would become Potosi. However, Pizarro's expeditions into Peru upset some of those early ideas on Spanish commercial development. (See Friede, Los Welser; both Stone and Tyce in Altman and Wheat's The Spanish Caribbean and the Atlantic World).

For the Spanish territories, the increase in expeditionary operations was directly connected to the post-1532 Pizarro entrada. German-speaking leaders commanded Spanish conquistadors into what authorities believed to be the northeastern limits of Inca territory. They were not Inca, however, but Muisca. Federmann's entrada starting from Venezuela, Belalcázar's entradas that started from Ecuador, and Quesada's adventure that was the first of the three to arrive in what is now Bogotá. Although the gold and silver was not as plentiful in Colombia as Pizarro's claims in Peru were, the land and resources of highland Muisca attracted more people from the coastal settlements. By the 1540s, Welser control over Venezuela collapsed and the Spanish authorities took over administrative duties there. Additional entradas from Peru pushed south in the late 30s and early 40s, setting up colonial interests in Chile. Despite the successes it would have as a colonial port city in the later 1500s, the Spanish struggled to organize the area around what would be Buenos Aires into a functioning outpost in the 1530s and 40s. (See Francis, Invading Colombia; Avellaneda Navas The Conquerors of the New Kingdom of Granada).

Again, I am not sure that South America is a scramble. I would be willing to give it that name if we included the entire Americas within that idea. Certainly the 'Atlantic Invasion of the Americas' needs a better name for the early conquest and pacification efforts of the region.