The qr// approach described in perlfaq6 (that is, versions of perlfaq6 that ship with Perl 5.005 or later, but not the one on this site) is much faster.

my @regexes = map { qr/\Q$_/ } @latin_am;
while (<>) {
    for my $regex (@regexes) {
        if ($_ =~ $regex) {
            print;
            last;
        }
    }
}
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