Global Ganja Report

2009 saw both a significant advance and retreat for a humane drug policy in Washington's two closest Drug War allies in Latin America. First in August—in a move that made few stateside headlines, and registered not a peep of protest from the Obama administration—Mexico's conservative President Felipe Calderón signed into law a bill decriminalizing "personal quantities" of all drugs.

The UN International Narcotics Control Board, in its annual report released Feb. 24 called on Peru's government to take measures to reduce the country's growing illicit coca cultivation. The 2009 report finds that the area under coca cultivation decreased in South America by 8% to 167,800 hectares in 2008, largely due to a major decline in Colombia, the world's top producer. But for a third consecutive year, cultivation increased in Peru, the second largest producer.

Colombian guerilla leader Jorge Enrique Rodríguez Mendieta AKA "Ivan Vargas" was sentenced to 20 years in prison by a District Court in New York March 19 for conspiring to import cocaine into the US. Mendieta, who was extradited in 2007, pleaded guilty in December to the charges, admitting that he was commander of the FARC's 24th Front from 1998 to 2004.