Takes a big part in it
But what really sealed the deal is that South America made bazzilions of money during WWII providing food to the allies, and they invest a big part of it in television broadcasting, we had a lot of new all latino channels in need of new content, since Japan was close and their entertainment industry and economy was recovering a lot in the 60's, South America made a lot of deals with them

Not an exaggeration, in fact. LA got into anime much, much earlier than most Western countries, somewhere around the 80's and already having a good presence. A good example is Dragon Ball itself. It arrived ridiculously late to the US, whereas kids all over South America were already collecting DB albums, cards, toys and pretending to do a Kamehameha in school's recess before the West saw its first English dub at all. It certainly helped that the whole anime scene was on normal TV on most channels right after school. Hell, even today, the effects kind of persist: ask any average anime fan about what retro anime they at least know of and it is likely to be a bigger list than that of an average Western fan of the same age.

"And by the time we saw Western anime fans, they were nothing to us but CASUALS!"