The rhetoric has changed. According to new U.S. “drug czar” Gil Kerlikowske, who heads the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), the Obama administration doesn’t use the term “drug war” because the government shouldn’t be waging war against its own citizens. In March 2009, U.S. Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke described the opium poppy eradication effort in Afghanistan as “the most wasteful and ineffective program that I have seen in 40 years.” He bluntly stated that the U.S. government had wasted millions of dollars on a counterproductive program that generates political support for the Taliban and undermines nation-building efforts. And in his trip to Peru this past April, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Arturo Valenzuela noted that the fundamental problem is not coca cultivation itself, but poverty and inequality.

Yet the indigenous and Afro-Colombian groups along the Naya River on Colombia’s Pacific coast tell a different story. For the past three months, coca fumigation operations have taken place in one of the most biologically diverse regions of the world. Despite myriad concerns – from its ineffectiveness to the damage done to human health and the environment – the Obama administration remains committed to this fumigation strategy as well as to the overall Plan Colombia. The rhetoric may have changed for the better, but the reality of the how the U.S. “war on drugs” is waged on the ground in Latin America has not.

That isn’t to say that there are no new developments. Important domestic reforms have begun. Following Holbrooke’s statements, the United States suspended funding for opium poppy eradication in Afghanistan. In its proposed fiscal year 2011 budget for assistance to Latin America, the Obama administration has shifted some resources from military to economic programs. Yet for now, given its other foreign policy priorities, the White House has little enthusiasm for taking on the entrenched “drug war” bureaucracy or in expending political capital in pushing for reform of international drug policy.