What Latin America faces instead is a war on its right to govern itself. Anyone who has studied the half-century arc of Washington’s ‘War on Drugs’ recognises the move instantly. Between 2001 and 2024, Washington channelled more than $20bn dollars in ‘anti-narcotics assistance’ to Latin America and the Caribbean – three quarters of it through the Pentagon. By every metric it set for itself – production, consumption, cartel power, deaths – the US War on Drugs is a failure of historic proportions, and its architects know it. What Latin America faces instead is a war on its right to govern itself – and the region’s independent governments, from Mexico City to Brasília to Caracas, are not the accused.