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This paper aims to offer a feminist, Latin-American reading on the gender representations that constitute the discourse on the US war on drugs in Latin America. Drawing upon the feminist literature on international security, this article explores some of the nuances of the US war-on-drugs discourse when it comes to gender. It argues that, although a gendered discourse has been constantly present in US official discourse, it has visibly changed in character as the USA’s antidrug policies became increasingly internationalized, militarized, and oriented by a ‘supply-side approach.’ Once deployed through the feminization of drug consumption as a moral degradation of the nation’s social body, US war-on-drugs discourse perceptibly changed to encompass a process of hyper-masculinization of the figure of the US drug warrior, supported by subordinate masculinities and femininities represented by the subaltern, feminized Latin American drug warriors, and the ruthless, hyper-aggressive drug lords. Ultimately, the gender(ed) cartographies of the USA’s war-on-drugs discourse work as conditions of possibility for framing the war on drugs as the only ‘solution’ to the ‘drug problem’ and reaffirm the incessant search for sovereignty that has as its ultimate goal the total control, domination and vigilance of human interaction with psychoactive substances: attributes of a hegemonic state masculinity par excellence. Through gendered (in)security performances, the state defends not only its ‘physical’ borders from external threats, but also its own frontiers of possibility.

The paper claims that it is necessary to seriously consider facts and phenomena beyond the ‘West’ in order to understand and theorise the complex social practices that shape the world. From a Latin American standpoint, it questions the traditional approach to a global matter: the War on Drugs. Researchers usually see this phenomenon in Latin America as reflecting US domination in the region. However, by identifying how and why the drug issue became a matter of security in Latin America and by specifying the collective countermeasures adopted, Latin American partici-pation becomes more apparent in the construction of the international process that gave rise to the normative framework that holds up the War on Drugs: the 1988 Vienna Convention. Keywords: War on Drugs; Global South; International Relations; Latin America; International Po-litical Sociology. Introduction The field of International Relations (IR) is admittedly neither international nor relational. On the one hand, its epistemological and empirical fields are anchored in sparse geo-graphical areas of the planet (Cervo 2008). On the other, the practice and construction of IR has been dominated single-handedly by theories and concepts crafted by academic communities located in the Unites States and Western Europe (Waever and Tickner 2009). Even so, by making use of the same classic concepts from IR, such provincialism has been questioned in territories different from the West (Tickner and Blaney 2013) and through non-western theory construction (Acharya and Buzan 2009). Criticism and questioning of the field is not only restricted to these places though; it also comes from those same cognitive sources and areas that dominate knowledge production (e.g.Salomon 2013

O presente artigo analisa o plano internacional da política anti-drogas dos EUA e questiona-se sobre se houve mudanças durante o governo Obama. Para entender o tema, incialmente é feito um breve histórico, posteriormente o foco recai sobre o planejamento do governo Obama e por fim são apresentadas observações sobre a aplicação de tal política. A conclusão é que não houve alterações substantivas: a cooperação internacional ocorre apenas de forma policial e militar., This article analyzes USA international drug policy and aims to understand if there were changes during Barack Obama administration. In order to do so, initially it presents a brief historical, then the focus is on Obama administration planning and finally it presents some observations about the police application. The partial conclusion is that there were no substantive alterations: international cooperation rests only in the security field.