Colombian President Gustavo Petro, Photo: Chepa Beltran/VWPics / Sciencephoto / Profimedia
Colombian President Gustavo Petro, a guerrilla member before becoming a politician, said he was ready “to take up arms” on Monday in the context of threats launched by his American counterpart, Donald Trump, after the US military operation in Venezuela, reports AFP.
Petro, targeted for months by Trump's insults and threats, wrote on the X platform: “I swore not to touch any weapon again… but for the country I will take up arms again.”
Over the weekend, the US president described his Colombian counterpart as “a sick man who likes to manufacture cocaine and ship it to the United States”.
Gustavo Petro, whose urban guerrilla group M-19 was disarmed under a 1989 peace accord, has had several exchanges with Donald Trump since the Republican's return to the White House.
Petro vehemently criticized the US military deployment in the Caribbean Sea, which began with the attack on boats accused by Washington of being involved in drug trafficking and culminated in Saturday's operation in Caracas, where the US military captured Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro.
Brought to the US, Maduro is charged by US authorities with narco-terrorism, conspiracy to import cocaine, possession of automatic weapons and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess automatic weapons and destructive devices. If convicted, he faces between decades and life in prison on each count.
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Washington removed Colombia from the list of countries certified as allies in the US war on drugs.
In a lengthy post on X, Colombia's president insisted his anti-narcotics policy is robust enough, but stressed there are limits to how aggressive the military can be.
“If you bomb even one of these groups without enough information, you will kill many children. If you bomb peasants, thousands will become guerrillas in the mountains. And if you detain the president, whom a good part of my people love and respect, you will unleash the popular jaguar,” he wrote.
The Trump administration is close to Colombia's right-wing opposition, which hopes to win legislative and presidential elections this year.
