On Tuesday, mayor of Rio de Janeiro Eduardo Paes announced an initiative aimed at reducing the use of crack cocaine. Although his language was bellicose, calling it a “constant fight,” the method is more benign; assistance centers to help females and minors conquer the vice.

The move is only the latest from a Latin government to emphasize compassion over comeuppance, and, while justifications for the change in approach have varied, they all testify to a diminishing U.S. hegemony in the region.

In Mexico, the government cited corruption-prone police as the motivating force behind its move to legalize drug possession. “This is not legalization, this is regulating the issue and giving citizens greater legal certainty,” said the Mexican attorney general’s office.

In Argentina, decriminalization of marijuana use came via supreme court ruling, with the Court’s President Ricardo Lorenzetti saying “behavior in private is legal, as long as it doesn’t constitute clear danger. The state cannot establish morality.”

For Portugal’s successful 2001 legalization, the logic was simple: prohibition and the resulting incarceration is more expensive than treatment, “so why not give drug addicts health services instead?”

Even the United States, origin and nexus of the War on Drugs, is changing its tune. Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske called for an end to the War on Drugs, calling the analogy “counterproductive.” Medicinal marijuana is legal in more than a dozen states. Last Tuesday’s elections saw Maine slacken its drug laws, Breckenridge, Colorado legalized small possession, and a recent poll shows a majority of Americans favor legalization.

Nevertheless, federal law trumps state legislation in the U.S., and the fed has yet to codify any loosened stance on marijuana. A White House vow not to prosecute medicinal marijuana cases is reversible at a presidential whim, and Kerlikowske, for his part, has offered only rhetorical change. He is, after all, a drug czar, and the tactics employed in his unconvential warfare remain largely identical.

But no matter. In a remarkably short amount of time, Latin governments have owned this issue, staking out nuanced positions arrived at through national experience, not foreign persuasion.

In 2006, Carlos Gaviria Diaz, a Supreme Court justice integral in Colombia’s own 1994 decision to legalize drug possession, said "I’m in favor of legalizing drugs, but I’m also aware that a government cannot do this…Colombia would become a pariah country."

In 2009, Mexico did exactly that, and earned in the process not the role of pariah, but, it seems, that of trendsetter.