There was a huge summit in Guatemala last month on changing counternarcotics strategies, prefaced by some interesting "paradigm shift" rhetoric from presidents in Colombia and Mexico (Los Zetas are actually (unintentionally) doing a lot right now to promote the cause of decriminalization)
With the new openness in Colombia, an incumbent in Bolivia who just dropped out of the UN Convention out of protest of coca leaves not being legal (and who kicked the DEA out 3 years) and a new leftist/nationalist president coming into office in Peru, there's a potentially interesting political alignment shaping up in the major producer countries. With Central American transit countries overwhelmed and overmatched by the security threats posed by transnational criminal organizations (and with US internal demand and insufficient arms trafficking protocols predominantly blamed), there's a a real regional push forming on this.
The question is whether the US would threaten vital aid programs (like they did the ATPDEA in Ecuador) if Peru or Colombia or any of the northern triangle unilaterally decriminalized narcotics (the answer right now is almost certainly yes, which is sad, because the specter of the economic damage those cuts would cause is probably enough to pressure even nominally anti-US administrations like Ecuador's into backing off, and with Venezuela going broke and Chavez facing an internal political crisis over health questions and an upcoming election, there's not enough socialist "ALBA" alternative petrodollars to sufficiently mitigate let alone offset the loss in US aid and trade benefits).
