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The president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, harshly criticized the president of the United States, Donald Trump, on Tuesday, describing him as having a "senile brain" after he referred to him as a "drug trafficking outlaw."
In a new episode of the verbal escalation between the two leaders, the Colombian stated that "The label Trump assigns me as a narcotrafficking outlaw is a reflection of his senile mind."
His response comes after the New York court did not mention the Cartel de los Soles during the hearing against Venezuelan Nicolás Maduro.
“I’m the one who said: there is no evidence of the existence of a 'Cartel of the Suns' in drug trafficking, which suggests they kidnapped Maduro to take control of Venezuela’s oil, following their Monroe Doctrine,” emphasized Petro in a lengthy post on X.
He added that "Colombia has neither oil nor gas, but it does have coal"; and emphasized that "if Colombia's coal reserves are extracted together with Venezuela's oil reserves," we would be "facing that spectacle of death akin to the bullfights of Roman Hispania."
"Real libertarians see themselves as narco-terrorists because we don't give them either coal or oil," Petro wrote on his X account referring to Trump.
The reaction of the Colombian president comes after Trump, when asked by reporters, made disparaging comments about the government of Bogotá and suggested that Colombia, like Venezuela, is "very sick" and could be subject to an intervention similar to the one that ended with the capture of Nicolás Maduro on January 3rd.
Trump stated explicitly that "it sounds good" to consider that possibility.
Petro stated that the growing tension with Washington is due to his administration's disagreement with what he calls "the irrationality of capitalism," which, in his view, drives the United States to pursue economic interests at the expense of the sovereignty of other countries.
"They want to turn us into colonies. To kill humanity is to kill their own children," the Colombian president added in another message, in which he described Trump's accusations as an attempt to justify undue pressure on his government.
The dispute between Petro and Trump is not new. The Colombian often responds to each attack from his American counterpart, and recently he told him that he was “misinformed” about the reality in the South American nation.
Since 2025, the U.S. administration has accused the Colombian president of allowing cocaine production to continue rising and has even sanctioned him along with family members and associates, while suspending part of the anti-drug aid and threatening harsher measures if the fight against drug trafficking was not intensified.
The tension with Washington is set against a tumultuous regional backdrop following the U.S. military operation in Venezuela that resulted in the capture of Nicolás Maduro, an event that has intensified the frictions among Bogotá, Caracas, and Washington.
Meanwhile, Petro has called for mobilizations "for sovereignty" in response to what he describes as illegitimate threats from abroad.
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