regional.pan.past-tense-preferences
He comido or comí: perfect vs preterite by region
Spain uses he comido for anything inside today, this week or this year; most of Latin America says comí and reserves the compound for genuinely experiential statements. The Rio de la Plata and the Andes avoid it most, and Bolivia adds a pluperfect used to mark surprise. The preterite is the safe choice everywhere.
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Explanation
Spanish has two ways to talk about a completed past: the compound pretérito perfecto (he comido) and the simple pretérito indefinido (comí). The Peninsular norm splits them by time frame. Anything inside a period that still includes now — today, this morning, this week, this year, this life — takes the compound: hoy he comido tarde, este año he viajado poco. Anything sealed off from now takes the simple: ayer comí tarde, el año pasado viajé poco. Time markers do the sorting, and hoy versus ayer is enough to flip the tense.
Most of Latin America does not run that split. The simple form covers both territories, so hoy comí tarde and ¿ya llegó? are entirely normal where a Spaniard would need he comido and ¿ya ha llegado? The compound has not disappeared, but it narrows to genuinely experiential or still-open situations: nunca he estado en Japón, siempre he pensado lo mismo, he trabajado aquí desde 2019. The avoidance is strongest in the Rio de la Plata, north-western Mexico and the Canaries, and the Andes go further still — in Bolivian and Peruvian highland Spanish the compound can be rare enough that its absence is itself a regional marker.
Two things follow for a learner. First, the preterite is the safe default: it is grammatical everywhere and only sounds slightly brusque in Madrid, whereas Peninsular-style he comido for something you did an hour ago sounds bookish in Buenos Aires. Second, watch what your textbook is teaching — most European-published courses drill the Peninsular split as if it were the rule for the language, which leaves learners over-producing the compound across an entire continent. One genuinely local extra: Andean Spanish, Bolivia especially, uses the pluperfect as a mirative — ¡había sido caro! means roughly "turns out it was expensive", reporting a discovery rather than an earlier past.
Examples
I ate late today.
Region: ES vs LatAm
Has he arrived yet?
Region: ES vs LatAm
I've never been to Japan.
Region: universal
So the ticket was expensive after all!
Region: BO/PE