ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an annotated overview of the trends, tendencies and important characteristics of the wars. The portrayal of statistical material occurs in two forms: tables and figures. The term “proxy-war” is often used in politics and the media to subsume all wars since 1945. This term serves to hide the real foundations of these wars. It is a formulaic phrase with its origins in ignorance, ideology, or pure propaganda. The economic, political and military centers of the world have thus, since the Second World War, been either free of war or experienced very few wars. Despite internal regional differences and the imperfections of the subdivisions people are comfortable stating that the bourgeois centers of the world are by and large pacified. The periods when Latin America was most prone to wars were the late 1940s, the 1960s, and the 1980s.
