Plutonium is present in every environmental compartment, due to a variety of nuclear activities. The Southern Hemisphere has received about 20% of the global Pu-239 and Pu-240 environmental inventory, with an important contribution of the so-called tropospheric fallout from both the atmospheric nuclear tests performed in the French Polynesia and in Australia by France and United Kingdom, respectively. In this work we provide new data on the impact of these tests to South America through the study of Pu-239 and Pu-240 in soils from different areas of Northern, Central and Southern Chile. The obtained results point out to the presence of debris from the French tests in the 20-40 degrees Southern latitude range, with Pu-240/Pu-239 atomic ratios quite heterogeneous and ranging from 0.02 to 0.23. They are significantly different from the expected one for the global fallout in the Southern Hemisphere for the 30-53 degrees S latitude range (0.185 +/- 0.047), but they follow the same trend as the reported values by the Department of Energy of United States for other points with similar latitudes. The Pu239 + 240 activity inventories show as well a wider variability range in that latitude range, in agreement with the expected heterogeneity of the contamination. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.