Colombia’s president warns Trump not to ‘wake the jaguar’ with threats of military strikes | Colombia

Colombia’s president has warned Donald Trump that he risks “waking the jaguar” after the US leader suggested that any country he believes produces illegal drugs destined for the US could be subject to military attack.

At a cabinet meeting on Tuesday, the US president said military strikes against ground targets inside Venezuela “will begin very soon.” Trump also warned that any country that produces narcotics could be a potential target, excluding Colombia, which has long been a close ally in Washington’s “war on drugs.”

Shortly after, Colombian President Gustavo Petro responded in a social media post: “Threatening our sovereignty is declaring war; do not damage two centuries of diplomatic relations.”

Petro also invited Trump to visit Colombia, the world’s largest cocaine producer, to see his government’s efforts to destroy drug-producing laboratories. “Come with me, I’ll show you how these are destroyed, every 40 minutes to the lab,” he wrote.

Since August, the Trump administration, under the pretext of counter-narcotics operations, has escalated tensions in South America to levels not seen since the 1989 invasion of Panama. The Pentagon deployed a massive naval force of nearly 15,000 troops to Venezuela’s doorstep in the Caribbean, killing more than 80 people in attacks on small boats allegedly carrying drugs.

“We’re going to start doing these attacks on the ground as well,” Trump said Tuesday.

“You know, the terrain is a lot easier, a lot easier. And we know the roads they take. We know everything about them. We know where they live. We know where the baddies live, and we’ll start that very soon.

Asked whether the effort would be limited to Venezuela, the US president said it would not.

“I heard that Colombia, I mean Colombia, produces cocaine. They have cocaine production facilities, okay? And then they sell their cocaine to us. We appreciate that very much. But yes, anyone who makes this and sells it to our country will be subject to attack,” he said.

The United States and Colombia, long-time allies in the “war on drugs,” found their relations nearly deteriorating from the moment Trump took office for a second term.

Their first clash took place in early January, when Petro, a former guerrilla and Colombia’s first left-wing president, refused to enter American planes carrying deported Colombians and insisted they be treated with dignity.

He later reversed that decision, but relations deteriorated further in September when Petro attended a pro-Palestinian protest in New York after attending the United Nations general assembly and called on US soldiers not to comply with Trump’s orders to “attack humanity”. He also harshly criticized air strikes on drug boats.

In response, the US state department revoked the Colombian president’s visa. Trump has since accused Petro, without providing any evidence, of being an “illegal drug trafficker” and of encouraging the massive production of narcotics, making it “Colombia’s main business.”

Trump’s threat to Colombia came just hours after the former Honduran president, convicted of drug trafficking and corruption, was released from a US prison after receiving a pardon from Trump.

Juan Orlando Hernández was sentenced to 45 years in prison for allegedly creating a “cocaine highway” to the United States. During his time in office, Honduras became a major transit point for northbound South American cocaine as well as a cocaine-producing hub.

Speaking at the Cabinet meeting, Trump called the investigation into Hernández, which began before his first term in office, a “terrible witch hunt by Biden.”

“If you have drug dealers in your country and you’re the president, you don’t necessarily put the president in prison for 45 years,” he said.