This article looks at an aspect of Latin America that does not receive enough attention in France: security. Relatively peaceful until the 1950s, this region suffered the repercussions of US-Soviet rivalry during the Cold War. Following the wave of democratisation in the 1980s, it faced three security challenges: consolidating peace; promoting and consolidating democracy; and dealing with the ‘new threats’. This last task, the most difficult of the three, today comes up against US-Latin American divergences of view.