With the notable exceptions of Chile and Brazil, Latin American countries have been slow in modernizing their armed forces, mainly because of a general absence of symmetrical threats. Indeed, since the wars of independence in the first half of the 19th century, there have been few interstate wars in the Americas, mostly limited to the consolidation and/or definition of borders, and not as disruptive as wars in Europe in the 1914-1945 period. The only exception was the Falklands/Malvinas war between Argentina and the United Kingdom (1982), in which the military government in Buenos Aires decided to invade the South Atlantic islands disputed with London and under British control. Hence, there were no total wars in Latin America either, except in the case of the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1869), which confronted Paraguay against the coalition formed by Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. Instead, asymmetric threats such as terrorism, guerrilla warfare and drug trafficking have been present in several Latin American countries, since the Cold War. As a result, governments have responded by procuring COIN (COunter Insurgency) weapons systems that would be ill-suited for interstate warfare. For these reasons, obsolescence of symmetrical weapons such as tanks, fighter jets and warships is the norm to many Latin American countries such as Colombia, which has faced COIN-centric challenges since the 1960s. The FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), the M-19 guerrilla movement, the presence of paramilitaries and drug cartels such as the ones of Medellin and Cali have focused government efforts on internal military responses, supported by the US through the "Plan Colombia", conceived in 1999 by Colombian President Andres Pastrana Arango and US President Bill Clinton. Thanks to this plan, the US has invested around $10 billion in military aid to Colombia between 2001 and 2016.
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