The 2008 Dakar Rally was cancelled four days before its scheduled departure from Lisbon following the killing of four French tourists in Mauritania in late 2007 and credible intelligence of further threats to competitors. Chile and Argentina offered to host the event, and the ASO accepted. The resulting South American editions introduced competitors to terrain fundamentally different from the Saharan Dakar — high-altitude Andean passes, salt flats, Atacama Desert pampas, and Peruvian dune fields.
The inaugural South American Dakar in 2009 attracted 501 competitors and was won by Giniel de Villiers for Volkswagen. Carlos Sainz, who had led the race comfortably before crashing out in 2009, won the following year's event for the same manufacturer. Volkswagen took a third consecutive win in 2011, this time with Nasser Al-Attiyah at the wheel, before withdrawing to focus on its World Rally Championship programme. Mitsubishi had already withdrawn following a poor 2009 result.
The departure of the factory teams allowed the X-raid team — campaigning Mini vehicles rather than BMWs — to come to the fore. Stéphane Peterhansel, who had joined the team in 2010, secured his fourth car-category win in 2012 and defended the title in 2013. In the motorcycle class KTM continued their dominance, with Cyril Despres and Marc Coma sharing victories through this period.
Early South American editions were based primarily in Argentina and Chile, using Buenos Aires as the traditional start and finish city. The route typically crossed the Andes, spent stages in the Chilean Atacama Desert, and returned through Andean foothills. From 2013 the rally began incorporating Peru as a starting or finishing location, bringing vast Pacific dune fields into the itinerary.
Nasser Al-Attiyah won for X-raid Mini in 2015, while Peugeot returned with a new diesel-powered two-wheel-drive contender that year but could not match the X-raid cars. Peugeot found success in 2016, 2017, and 2018 under Peterhansel and other drivers, before withdrawing. In 2019, the first edition held entirely in a single country (Peru), Toyota won for the first time with Al-Attiyah, whose earlier victories had come with Volkswagen and X-raid.
In the motorcycle category Australian Toby Price took his first Dakar win for KTM in 2019, while Sam Sunderland and Matthias Walkner won the 2017 and 2018 editions for the same manufacturer — contributing to KTM's remarkable streak of eighteen consecutive motorcycle category victories from 2001 through 2019.
Increasingly strained relationships between the ASO and South American governments, culminating in a controversial 2019 disqualification of Bolivian quad rider Juan Carlos Salvatierra, contributed to the decision to leave the continent. The rally moved to Saudi Arabia from 2020 onwards. The South American phase had lasted eleven editions and introduced Andean desert geography — particularly the dune systems of Peru and the Atacama — as major competitive theatres in the rally raid calendar.
The South American route drew on several distinct landscape types unavailable in Africa. The Peruvian coastal dune fields around Ica and Pisco presented some of the world's largest sand dune systems outside the Sahara. The Atacama Desert stages in northern Chile offered hard-packed salt flats, rocky pampas, and canyon crossings at altitude. The Argentine Puna plateau brought competitors into high-altitude desert environments above 4,000 metres. Navigation remained a core challenge, with stages regularly exceeding 500 kilometres in competitive distance.