Fraying relations continue between the government of Gustavo Petro of Colombia and the United States after Petro accused the U.S. of targeting Colombian nationals on board a suspected drug boat in the Caribbean, last week.
The claims by the Colombian president were called “baseless” by the White House, as the administration in Washington urges Petro to “publicly retract” the statement.
The claims followed in the wake of a recent strike on a suspected drug boat on October 3, confirmed by an X post by the U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who stated that the strike killed four individuals, adding that the vessel was loaded with a “substantial amount of narcotics” headed to the United States.
President Petro has been one of the vocal critics of the Trump administration’s recent deployment of U.S. military assets to the South Caribbean, arguing that recent U.S. actions amount to a “war for oil.”
The U.S. State Department says that a bolstered military presence in the region is designed to curtail the flow of illicit narcotics into the United States, a trade that the U.S. government claims is facilitated by top officials of the Maduro regime in Caracas.
The deployment began shortly after the U.S. Justice Department revised a reward in the amount of $50,000,000 for information leading to the arrest of Nicolás Maduro. The State Department under Marco Rubio has declared the Maduro regime as the “illegitimate government of Venezuela”, citing fraudulent election results and the systematic suppression of Venezuelan opposition leaders.
Meanwhile, U.S.-Colombian relations have been in shambles since the return of President Trump to the White House. The government of President Petro, a former rebel of the left-wing M-19 guerrilla movement, has made very little progress with the United States, Colombia’s largest trading partner.
The United States has recently criticized the Colombian head of government for coming to the defense of the Venezuelan government and for conducting recent military exercises with Venezuelan forces along the Colombian-Venezuelan border.
Following the accusations by the Colombian president of U.S. strikes targeting a boat that, according to Petro, was “Colombian with Colombian citizens inside”, the government in Bogotá has yet to provide any evidence to support its claims.
