(Adnkronos) – Amidst the increasingly military escalation with Venezuela, Donald Trump once again turns his arrows against Gustavo Petro, with new accusations and threats against Colombia’s first leftist president. “We love Colombians, but the new leader is a troublemaker, and he better be careful, he better close those cocaine factories, there are three big cocaine factories sending to the United States,” Trump said last night in Mar a Lago.
“We know where they are,” Trump added, with a not-so-veiled threat, speaking of the factories, branding Petro as “a very, very bad guy” and “not a friend of the United States.” The new attack against the Colombian president was prompted by a request for comment on Petro’s criticism of Trump’s demand that Venezuela return to the US the assets seized during Caracas’s oil nationalization.
“Texas is a territory that was invaded, not sold, as are California and all of the Southern US,” said the Colombian leader. The Venezuela issue has become the major breaking point between the two leaders, at opposite ends of the political spectrum, with Trump explicitly stating last week that Petro “will be next” in the alleged anti-drug trafficking campaign, currently focused on Nicolas Maduro’s Venezuela.
Petro, who has long been trying to mediate between Caracas and the opposition to resolve the political and humanitarian crisis and has also sought mediation to resolve the military crisis with the US, accuses Trump of actually being interested only in Venezuelan oil, as he said in a CNN interview, stating that the American president “does not think about the democratization of Venezuela, much less about drug trafficking.”
Petro has strongly criticized US raids against vessels described as narco-terrorists, denouncing the killing of Colombian fishermen and asking the UN to denounce “human rights violations” by Washington. Meanwhile, the Trump administration in October adopted sanctions against the president and his family, accusing him of “allowing drug cartels to prosper and refusing to stop this activity.”
Meanwhile, the Colombian president has declared an “economic and social emergency” after Congress refused to approve the tax reform included in the 2026 budget. The decree signed by Petro will allow his government to adopt new taxes, citing as the reason “the material and legal inability to continuously, timely, and sufficiently guarantee the effective enjoyment of certain fundamental rights and the provision of essential public services.”
