The aim of this chapter is twofold. First, it seeks to analyse, from a critical perspective, how the punitive and racialised model known as the War on Drugs has been implemented in South America as a hegemonic mechanism to control, police and criminalise the urban periphery and the socially marginalised and poor groups and communities that inhabit it. I argue that this punitive model has functioned as a continuation of colonial power of the ‘periphery’ of the world and has proved particularly aggressive for Latin America, where it has ended up shaping criminal drug policies in much of the region—and by extension the regional system of control and surveillance—leading to prison overcrowding and the securitisation and militarisation of public security. I argue that this has been made possible by two elements: the stereotyping of the crime of drug trafficking and the criminalisation of urban spaces such as favelas, slums and shantytowns, and of the people who inhabit them, especially ethnically marginalised young people who are seen as the perpetrators of violence and disorder. I argue, in turn, that this model has been able to take root in South America thanks to the authoritarian legacy, undemocratic military and security forces and a punitivist criminal justice system. The second part of the chapter discusses the responses of Southern criminology as an alternative to the punitive model of the War on Drugs. It proposes a southernising the concept of the war on drugs.