Requirements engineering is a major challenge for software developers. Interaction with stakeholders to specify the needs that software products must meet requires the adoption of effective and successful practices. Despite the increasing offer of proposals from researchers, the degree of adoption of methodologies, techniques and tools at this stage of the software process is not clear. This study intends to show the reality of the software industry in Latin America regarding the engineering of requirements and to compare it with information set out in the scientific literature. For this, a systematic mapping of the scientific literature and an empirical study of 35 software development companies were carried out, using surveys and interviews. The results show that interviews and use cases are the most frequently used techniques for requirements elicitation and analysis, and that there is a low adoption rate of formal documentation techniques, tools and formal methodologies. Finally, a considerable gap was identified between that which is proposed by researchers in the literature and what is actually adopted by the software development industry.