The tone has only risen in the White House against Colombian President Gustavo Petro. This Sunday night, President Donald Trump spoke with journalists from his presidential plane, Air Force One, about the operation to capture Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. And without anyone asking him about Colombia, he once again dedicated a few words to the neighboring country. “Colombia is governed by a sick man, who likes to make cocaine and sell it to the United States, but he is not going to continue for much longer, let me tell you,” he stated. He later insisted that Petro has “cocaine mills, cocaine factories.” When a journalist asked him if the United States is considering “an operation like the one in Venezuela,” Trump did not rule it out: “It sounds good to me.”
The message against the president of Colombia echoes another that Trump himself said the day before, at a press conference from Florida, just hours after capturing Maduro. When speaking briefly about Gustavo Petro, he stated that he “is producing cocaine and sending it to the United States. So he better watch his ass.” And shortly before, on December 23, Trump stated something similar against Petro: “You better be careful because you have drug factories. They manufacture cocaine in Colombia and send it to the United States. You better close those cocaine factories.”
In parallel, President Petro has done nothing but condemn the United States attack on Venezuela through statements from the Foreign Ministry but also with long texts on his social networks. “Without a legal basis to carry out an action against the sovereignty of Venezuela, the detention becomes a kidnapping,” he said this afternoon in his X account about the capture of Nicolás Maduro. “What Donald Trump has done is aberrant. They have destroyed the rule of law worldwide. They have bloodily urinated on the sacred sovereignty of all of Latin America and the Caribbean,” he added.
Petro has also repeatedly defended himself against the accusation that he is a drug trafficker. “My name in 50 years does not appear in the judicial files on drug trafficking either before or now. Stop slandering me, Mr. Trump,” he said this Sunday from his “Because of what I said, you took the pride of punishing my opinion,” Petro considers. After that demonstration, the United States government revoked the visa of the Colombian president.
Petro has had a tense relationship with Donald Trump since the beginning of 2025, when the Colombian head of state decided to return a plane with deported and chained migrants, and the North American then decided to threaten the South American country with tariffs. Diplomatic channels lowered the tension, and both the country’s military forces and some political leaders today maintain channels of dialogue with the Trump administration. But if in the White House they have lowered the volume with sanctions against Colombia, they have raised it with sanctions on the president. In October, the Treasury Department included Petro on a list that associates him with drug trafficking, an accusation for which there has been no evidence.
Although during Gustavo Petro’s administration the number of coca crops in the country has increased, according to some surveys that the president disputes, this boom has been associated more with a failure of the Government’s peace policy, and the strengthening of armed groups that traffic drugs, than with an alliance of the president to the drug world. The White House, however, does not see it that way and every day it raises its tone of threat to the Colombian president.
For more updates, visit our homepage: NewsTimesWire
