The president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, stated this Tuesday that US Senator Bernie Moreno, a Republican of Colombian origin, “he is desperate” because he wants President Donald Trump “shock” with his Government.
Petro said in a council of ministers broadcast on television to the country that it is “very paradoxical” that given the results that his Government has obtained “against drug traffickers we have an attack as brutal and as lying, slanderous, as the one coming from some political figures in the United States.”
“This is my ‘I accuse’ (title of a letter from the French writer Émile Zola) that we are going to complete (…) so that it is known why Trump has been encouraged by US Senator Bernie Moreno, of Colombian origin, to clash with us. That is not for Trump,” he stated.
The relationship between Colombia and the United States is experiencing a new crisis due to Petro’s criticism of Trump’s anti-drug policy in the Caribbean Sea, near Venezuela, and especially the bombing of boats supposedly loaded with drugs, attacks in which, as he said tonight, At least 27 people have died, some of them Colombians.
Trump responded Sunday with an announcement on his Truth Social network in which he said he would cut off financial aid to Colombia for its alleged inaction in the fight against drugs and accused Petro of being “a drug trafficking leader who encourages the mass production of drugs, both in large and small fields, throughout Colombia.”
“So Trump, because he is a vulnerable victim of a man like Bernie Moreno, trying to throw dirty water at us for everything, tells him that I am a drug trafficker,” Petro indicated.
(Read more: Petro-Trump tension: the ‘blows’ to Colombia that country leaders ask to reconsider)
President Gustavo Petro
Presidency
Petro’s scathing critic
Moreno, Republican from Ohio and severe critic of Petro and his policy of peace and the fight against drugs, recently pointed out in X that “Colombia deserves a leader who improves the lives of its people, not the well-being of narcoterrorists” and that he hopes there will be a change in the country with the 2026 elections.
According to Petro, in a debate that took place in the Colombian Congress In 2000, he showed “the link between Senator Bernie Moreno in the United States and the drug trafficking and paramilitary politics and governance that was imposed before 2000 in Colombia.”
“And this must be known to the people of Ohio, it must be translated into English,” added the president, who defined the Republican senator as “a Colombian and North American character” what has “taken the role that the Colombian ambassador to the United States should have.”
Despite the tense bilateral situation, The governments of Colombia and the United States took the first steps to overcome the diplomatic crisis during a meeting “long, frank and constructive” that Petro and his ambassador in Washington, Daniel García-Peña, held on Monday night with the Head of Mission and Chargé d’Affaires of the US Embassy in Bogotá, John T. McNamara.
According to a statement from the Foreign Ministry, “The representatives of both countries agreed that this is the first approach in favor of correcting the current impasse in bilateral relations and that new meetings will be held with the aim of reaching a prompt solution”.
(Read more: Petro assures that FTA is ‘de facto suspended by unilateral decision of the US’)
EFE
