The United States Treasury sanctions Petro for alleged links to drug trafficking

The United States government has just published on the official website of the Treasury Department that it has included the president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, on the Clinton list, as the list that designates people associated with drug trafficking is known. Others know it as the OFAC list. In addition to the head of state, the names of his wife, Veronica Alcocer, his eldest son, Nicolás Petro Burgos, and his Minister of the Interior, Armando Benedetti, also appear there. The Clinton list is usually associated with a kind of commercial paralysis, because it often seeks to freeze the transactions and bank accounts of those on the list, making their mobility, both financial and for travel, more difficult.

“The Treasury sanctions the President of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, for his role in illicit drug trafficking,” says the Department’s account in poison the Americans.”

Petro immediately responded to the ad. “Indeed, Bernie Moreno’s threat was fulfilled, I and my children and my wife entered the OFAC list,” the Colombian president wrote in X, referring to one of his Republican opponents in the United States Congress. “My lawyer in my defense will be Dany Kovalik from the United States. Fighting drug trafficking for decades and effectively brings me this measure of the government of the society that we help so much to stop their cocaine consumption.”

The news occurs after a tense week between Presidents Petro and Trump, after the latter, last Sunday, called Petro of being a drug trafficking leader. That same day it was announced that Colombia would be punished with tariffs, but the announcement never came on Monday. Trump, on the other hand, announced that no more cooperation money would be sent to Colombia, which would mean ending the security support that the South American country has received for more than two decades. But it also began to be rumored that, although there was no announcement of tariffs on the country, a direct punishment would come to the president. Indeed, said punishment came, but not only to him but to two of his relatives and his Minister of the Interior.

“Because I have defended the dignity of the country and that President Gustavo Petro is not a drug trafficker, they put me on the OFAC list without me having attacked them,” Minister Benedetti responded. “This shows that every empire is unjust and that its anti-drug fight is an arms farce. In this country, no one believes the story that I am a drug trafficker. I have never entered the house of a single drug trafficker. For the United States, a non-violent statement is the same as being a drug trafficker. Gringos go home”.

Republican Bernie Moreno, denounced by Petro for being the one who generated the crisis against him in the White House, only shared the news with a mocking message: “FAFO.” An acronym that could be translated into: “If they bother us and they will know what happens.”

No Colombian president in the 21st century has been sanctioned like Petro has been today. The last was Ernesto Samper, who lost his visa to the United States when several of his allies confessed that money from drug trafficking entered the liberal politician’s presidential campaign in 1994. Behind the sanctions announced this Friday in Washington there may be a similar suspicion. The president’s eldest son is currently being investigated for money laundering and illicit enrichment, after his ex-wife revealed to the magazine Week who, in 2022, met with businessmen of dubious reputation who wanted to finance his father’s campaign. That could explain why Clinton appears on the list today.

“The same prosecutor Lucy Laborde, in a hearing, stated that my case has nothing to do with drug trafficking or the presidential campaign. Due to the sole fact of being Gustavo Petro’s son, they unjustly put me on the Clinton List. An unprecedented political and judicial persecution. I will go to international organizations to defend my rights,” Nicolás Petro responded in the local newspaper. The Time.

the same magazine Week revealed, on another occasion, an audio in which the Minister of the Interior, Armando Benedetti, who was key in Petro’s 2022 campaign, alludes to a possible infiltration of drug trafficking money into the campaign. “Read how the motherfucker 8,000 started and why it started, there is the key to everything that is going to happen to you,” he shouted at Petro’s then right-hand woman, Laura Sarabia. Process 8,000 is how the investigation against Samper for drug trafficking money became known. That said, neither the judicial system nor the National Electoral Council, which reviews campaign accounts, have so far confirmed drug trafficking money in Gustavo Petro’s campaign.

Before the current crisis, in addition, the United States government decertified Colombia as an ally country in the fight against drugs. The latest United Nations reports have revealed a constant growth in coca crops – something that began with the previous government of Iván Duque – and that has gone hand in hand with a strengthening of the armed groups that traffic drugs to the United States. Petro has defended himself by saying that the reports have methodological errors and that, although he has not focused on the small farmer who grows the coca leaf, he has made more seizures than any other president on land and sea before the drug reached the United States. “The Colombian strategy against drugs is more effective than what is being said,” he said yesterday at a press conference with international media. “I brought 700 drug traffickers extradited to the United States,” he also stated. Data that doesn’t seem to matter to Donald Trump.

The president of the United States has given a new lease of life to Richard Nixon’s old war on drugs, and under that flag he has begun to bomb boats in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean, alleging, without evidence, that they belonged to drug traffickers and were headed to North America. Secretary of Defense Pete Heghseth, who prefers to be called Secretary of War, has insisted in recent days that he will go after the drug cartels as the United States once went after the Islamist group Al Qaeda. It has already designated the Tren de Aragua, a criminal organization of Venezuelan origin but with a presence in several Latin American countries, as a terrorist group. He has also announced that he is seeking a reward for Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s authoritarian leader, for being a member of a Soles cartel, an organization also linked to drug trafficking. The new chapter of this Trump war is being played in Colombia and, not only in boats or submarines, but with harsh sanctions against Gustavo Petro.