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The westward acceleration of the South American plate after the opening of the Southern Atlantic Ocean during the Late Cretaceous has been regarded as the driving mechanism for the onset of contractional tectonics along the western margin of South America, ultimately promoting the inversion of Mesozoic backarc basins and the formation of the Andean mountain chain (Ramos, 2009;Somoza & Zaffarana, 2008) (Figure 1). Since then, deformation processes have been mainly controlled by the geometry of the oceanic slab and the rate and obliquity of convergence between the subducting and South American plates (e.g.,

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