Colombian President Gustavo Petro accused U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio this Friday of being imbued with Zionist fundamentalism and of being "the most problematic bubble" surrounding President Donald Trump.
His statements were made during an interview on the program 'Los Desayunos' from RTVE and EFE, as part of the Summit in Defense of Democracy, which gathers in Barcelona from April 16 to 19, over a hundred progressive leaders from around the world.
"I saw the most problematic agenda in Marco Rubio, imbued with Zionist fundamentalism," stated Petro.
The Colombian president added that the Secretary of State, despite his Cuban origin, "forgets the Latin American diversity" and categorizes the region within a right-left framework.
He pointed out that Rubio "sees Fidel Castro in each one of us", and emphasized with irony that the Secretary of State never even met the Cuban leader because his family left Cuba before the Revolution.
Petro also referred, with evident sarcasm, to the Colombian origins of Rubio's wife, Jeanette Dousdebes, daughter of parents from Cali and Bogotá.
"His wife is Colombian, I don't know, let's say, it would be worth investigating," he said, suggesting that this circumstance further highlights the official's attitude towards Latin America.
Regarding Trump, Petro described the U.S. president as someone who lives "surrounded by bubbles, by people foreign to him, each with a different agenda and competing with one another," and who acts "as if he were playing a video game without reasoning" with millions of human beings.
The Colombian president also stated that Trump is "pulled by Netanyahu, not the other way around," and that the Israeli prime minister has "stronger friends in the government than Trump himself."
Petro also criticized Latin American presidents who, in his view, behave like "courtiers" before Washington.
"Sometimes I see some Latin American presidents as if they were courtiers, as if we had a new king, when we got rid of the king," he declared.
The statements made this Friday are part of a long history of tensions between Bogotá and Washington.
In October 2025, the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the Department of the Treasury (OFAC) OFAC sanctioned Petro, his wife, his son, and former ambassador Armando Benedetti for alleged links to drug trafficking.
In November of that same year, Petro directly challenged Rubio: "If you're going to imprison me, let's see if you can".
The crisis eased somewhat when Trump received Petro at the White House on February 3, 2026, in a meeting that lasted over two hours.
According to Petro himself, he showed the American president a video of the assassination attempt he suffered in Cúcuta in 2018, in order to refute the narrative that he was the "head of drug trafficking."
Petro also announced that on April 24 he will travel to Caracas to meet with the Venezuelan government, and he proposed a period of "co-governance" of one or two years between the ruling party and the opposition as a preliminary step before holding free elections.
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