Based on 56 rainfall stations, which cover the period 1961–2008, we analyzed the presence of trends in the drought-affected area over southern South America (SSA) at different time scales. In order to define drought conditions, we used the standardized precipitation index, which was calculated on time scales of 1, 3, 6, 9 and 12 months. The trends were estimated following both a linear and a non-linear approach. The non-linear approach was based on the residual of the empirical mode decomposition, a recently proposed methodology, which is robust in presence of non-stationary data.