The official view in U.S. and Latin American government circles is that there is no arms race going on in South America, and that most countries are just modernizing their armed forces. Hmmm, I wonder.

Before we get into what various governments say, let’s look at the latest figures from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which tracks military expenditures and arms transfers around the world on an annual basis.

According to SIPRI’s 2008 annual yearbook, South America has increased military spending by 33 percent in real terms – after inflation – since 2000. Last year, South America spent nearly $40 billion on its armed forces, the Swedish research institute says. More specifically, the report says:

Over the last five years, Venezuela, Ecuador and Chile had the biggest increases in military spending in South America. In constant dollars, Venezuela increased its military spending by 78 percent, Ecuador by 53 percent and Chile by 49 percent.

In Central America, the top spender was Honduras, which increased military spending by 20 percent over the last five years.

Mexico increased its military spending by 15 percent over the last five-year period. Last year, Mexico spent nearly $4 billion on its military, a 13 percent increase over the previous year.

Brazil announced late last year a 50 percent increase in its military budget, and plans to buy conventional submarines and develop nuclear submarines. Last year, it ranked 12th among the world’s biggest military spenders.

As a percentage of their respective economies, Colombia spent 4 percent of its gross domestic product on its military last year, followed by Chile with 3.6 percent and Ecuador with 2.3 percent.

Granted, many countries in the region have long neglected their militaries, and both the salaries of their troops and military equipment had fallen behind.

Ecuador, for instance, had cut its military expenditures in half in the late 1990s, and has since focused largely on increasing military salaries, the Swedish institute says. And Colombia is spending on its military because of its internal conflict, it says.

And it is also true that South America is not among the world’s regions that spend the most on their militaries.

But Venezuela has raised eyebrows in recent weeks by announcing more than $4 billion in purchases of Russian weapons, including Mi-35 combat helicopters, SU-30 combat aircraft and surface-to-air missiles.

Venezuela’s authoritarian President Hugo Chavez, who in 1999 announced that “we won’t spend in aircraft or tanks. . . . We won’t increase our military spending,” said Aug. 3 that he’s now buying weapons to defend his “Bolivarian revolution” against the U.S. “empire.” (You can see his 1999 speech on www.youtube.com.)

Is there an arms race in South America? I asked Colombian Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos.

“I don’t think so, because I don’t see that countries are competing to see who buys more weapons,” Santos said. “Some are buying a lot of weapons, others are replacing what they had, but I don’t think you can talk about an arms race.”

Stephen Johnson, the U.S. Defense Department’s head of Western Hemisphere affairs, agrees.

“Like everything else, defense equipment wears out. Clearly, there is some modernization going on, even in Venezuela,” Johnson told me. “But in Venezuela’s case, when these purchases signal an intent to project power or intimidate, those kind of actions may cause others to sense danger, and inspire them to spend more to protect themselves.”

The SIPRI 2008 yearbook says that while it is “doubtful” that Latin America’s recent arms purchases “are signs of an arms race in the sense of an action-reaction pattern, nonetheless there have been big increases in military spending in some countries in the region.”

My opinion: Technically, those who say there is no arms race may be right – the term is generally meant to describe a direct correlation between countries’ arms purchases over an extended period of time.

But the latest increase in regional military expenditures should be a cause of alarm and trigger new diplomatic efforts in the region to negotiate a cap on countries’ military spending.

Whether you call it an “arms race” or an “increase in military spending,” it’s the same phenomenon. In most cases – with exceptions such as Colombia, which is fighting a terrorist insurgency – it is a senseless, and contagious, waste of money in a region that still has some of the world’s highest poverty rates.