President Gustavo Petro dismissed Trump’s claims of Colombia’s involvement in drug smuggling as false, calling for an objective and delayed approach to resolving disputes.
On Monday, Colombian President Gustavo Petro defended himself against the threats of US President Donald Trump. After the US military action in neighboring Venezuela, he called him a drug smuggler, warned him to “be careful” and did not rule out a US military intervention in Colombia. Petro sharply criticized Saturday’s bombing of Caracas and the dragging of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro to New York. TASR informs about it according to the report of the AFP agency.
During a briefing aboard Air Force One, Trump declared that Colombia is a “sick country” and “run by a sick person who likes to make cocaine and sell it to the United States.” According to Trump, Petro has factories for the production of cocaine on the territory of Colombia and warned that such a situation will not prevail there for a long time. When asked if he was planning a military intervention in Colombia similar to the one in Venezuela, he replied that it “sounds good” to him because they are killing a lot of people there.
Petro denies the allegations
“I strongly reject Trump speaking without knowledge. My name has not appeared in 50 years of (Colombian) drug trafficking court files, past or present,” Petro said. He emphasized that the judiciary in the country is not under his control. “Stop slandering me, Mr. Trump. This is not how you threaten a Latin American president who emerged from an armed struggle and then from the struggle for peace of the Colombian people,” he declared.
In another post, he harshly criticized the US bombing of the Venezuelan capital Caracas and the deportation of President Nicolás Maduro to the US. “The United States is the first country in human history to bomb a South American capital. Neither Netanyahu, nor Hitler, nor Franco, nor Salazar did it,” the left-wing president emphasized.
Tensions between allies
AFP reminds that Colombia and the United States are key military and economic allies in the region. Since Trump took office, the leaders of the two countries have regularly clashed over issues of migration, tariffs or drug smuggling.
