A ceasefire in the war on drugs

The liberalisation of drug policies in Latin American nations is a blip, not a trend

"The tide is clearly turning." That's the former Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso's assessment of opinion on the failed war on drugs. In February, he co-authored a report calling for a reformed drug policy, including the decriminalisation of marijuana. Its arguments now appear to have powerful sympathisers. Within days of each other, the Argentine supreme court and the Mexican government have taken steps to decriminalise drug use.

The extent of the moves is varied: the Mexican decision allows the possession of small quantities of cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine; in Argentina, marijuana has not yet been fully decriminalised. Yet, placed alongside the release of 1,500 drug mules from Ecuador's jails last year, the news has led some to suggest that Latin America is on the verge of an anti-prohibition revolution.

If only that were the case. Not even in Latin America is the war on drugs under serious threat. Indeed, Colombia is undertaking the task with renewed enthusiasm. The country that has most suffered from drug prohibition, and has most to gain from objecting to it, has no prominent legalisation movement. Its attitude to drug consumption is hardening. In 1994, well before the moves in Mexico and Argentina, Colombia decriminalised a "minimal dose" for personal use: the constitutional court ruled that up to 20g of cannabis, 1g of cocaine and 2g of synthetic drugs were included in the right to freely develop one's personality. Now that allowance is facing presidential opposition.

The problem is public opinion. For urban Colombians, the failure of prohibition has become tolerable in part because it has become peripheral to their daily lives. Seven years of President Álvaro Uribe have pushed the conflict from the cities further into the countryside, driving homicides down and holidays up. This success has convinced many Colombians that the war on drugs can be won, or at least managed.

Uribe relies on sleight of hand. He distracts from the undiminished drug trade by defining the conflict in different terms: the strength of the Farc guerrillas and the fate of the leading traffickers. Today the Farc stands diminished, even if drug production does not. No trafficker aspires to the luxury enjoyed by Pablo Escobar, even if plenty still experience the top of the greasiest pole.

Hence a president spinning an unprecedented hard line has even gained the support of those favouring legalisation, such as the Economist and the musician Juanes. To convince waverers, the government has propagated half-truths, such as the argument that coca cultivation means ecocide.

Uribe's influence goes further still. He has developed a discourse linking drug trafficking to drug taking. "Behind consumption are the traffickers. The use of drugs is a way to commit children to drug trafficking," he said in July, in support of a new congressional initiative to change the constitution.

The minimal-dose law may survive, but its legitimacy is now being seriously questioned. As one political observer puts it, Uribe "could create a generation of people against personal use". There is already sizeable social intolerance: according to surveys by Antanas Mockus, Colombians would rather live next to a drug dealer than a drug user.

The other half of the equation is paradoxical. While the drug war has become peripheral to Colombians' lives, it has also become central to their national identity. Over the course of two decades, Colombians have seen humiliations from the political to the personal. An incumbent president had his US visa revoked; Colombians travelling abroad face demeaning airport searches. The nation is all too aware that, for many foreigners, this fascinating country has been reduced to a white powder.

So, when Carla Bruni's lyrics likened an addictive love to la blanche colombienne, Colombia's then foreign minister made an official complaint. The move was seen domestically as a step towards reinventing the country as passionate and exciting: anything but drug-related. This new image demands no innovative drug policy.

Many Colombians – especially the wealthy, including members of the senate – would welcome global drug liberalisation and even legalisation. Yet they speak out sparingly, because doing so risks tarnishing the country's image once more. There is a section of the population prepared to defend the minimal dose vocally, but it is a small minority.

Will Ecuador, Argentina and Mexico come to follow Colombia's lead, and become more reluctant to question the war on drugs? Maybe not to the same extent, given their different political cultures. In particular, they have the advantage of leftwing movements free of links with guerrillas.

However, the three countries are also relative newcomers to the drug war. Unlike Colombia, they can equivocate about whether the fight is worthwhile, without having to question decades of endeavour or tie their national reputations to drugs. Even so, their tentative liberalising steps are those of the rebellious adolescents who backpack the Andes before heeding parental pressure to settle down.

In Ecuador, President Rafael Correa's decision to release drug mules was pragmatic and personal. The country's prisons are overcrowded. Correa's own father had been caught smuggling drugs into the US – he was, in the president's words, "a victim of the system". On high-profile issues, the approach is very different. Correa has militarised the country's border with Colombia in the face of the penetration of Farc guerrillas in the north-east and drug gangs in the north-west.

In doing so, the Ecuadorian president has very probably committed his successors to the war on drugs. Mexico's government and Argentina's judges are in similar positions: they both want decriminalisation to allow control efforts to be focused on the cartels, not on drug reform. Under US and Colombian guidance, Mexican security forces are readying themselves for a protracted struggle. If the tide is turning, it may not be the way ex-president Cardoso thinks.