Colombian President Gustavo Petro suggested Tuesday’s acquittal of the country’s former president Alvaro Uribe could open the door to sanctions from the United States given the Trump administration’s support for the right-wing leader.
Alvaro had been found guilty in July of bribing a paramilitary witness to lie about alleged links to him, but a Colombian appeals court overturned that conviction.
Petro decried the latest ruling on social media, accusing Uribe of being aligned with Colombia’s right-wing paramilitary groups.
“This is how the history of paramilitary governance in Colombia is covered up—that is, the history of the politicians who came to power in alliance with drug trafficking and unleashed genocide in Colombia,” the left-wing president said on X, seemingly referencing the systematic extermination of the Patriotic Union party by drug cartels, paramilitary groups, and state agents in the 1980s and 1990s.
“Now Trump, allied with these politicians and with Uribe, will seek to sanction the president who denounced, throughout his life, the alliances between Colombian political power and paramilitary drug trafficking in Colombia,” Petro added, “and he does so with the help of those who helped paramilitarism in the country.”
In recent days, tensions between the U.S. and Colombia have escalated as the U.S. military continues to strike Venezuelan and Colombian vessels that President Donald Trump alleges are carrying drugs.
The Trump administration says the people aboard these vessels are narcoterrorists and drug traffickers, whereas Petro argues some of them are ordinary civilians. He has repeatedly denounced the U.S. for allegedly murdering a Colombian fisherman in one of its Caribbean strikes last month.
At least 32 people have been killed in these strikes since early September.
In a separate post, Petro said the victims were “all poor people” and that with Trump’s threat of using military force in Colombia and Venezuela over drug trafficking, a path will be paved for the U.S. to “bring personal sanctions against me, as if I were the head of drug trafficking in the world.”
Over the weekend, Trump announced the U.S. cut subsidies to Colombia and threatened to strike drug production fields within the South American nation if Petro doesn’t shut them down immediately. Trump also teased a higher tariff on Colombia, which already pays a 10% baseline tariff.
Before that, Trump announced the CIA was recently authorized to conduct clandestine operations within Venezuela to undermine President Nicolas Maduro’s government. Maduro faces federal charges in the U.S. related to his alleged narcoterrorism and drug-trafficking ties.
In an interview with Univision on Monday, Petro suggested Trump should be overthrown because of his threats against Colombia’s sovereignty. After his comments sparked backlash from Latino Republicans in Congress, he rushed to defend himself.
“I didn’t threaten Trump,” the Colombian president wrote on X. “I just said that Trump should change his heart from defending death-dealing policies around the world, like the genocide in Palestine, to life-dealing policies. If that change doesn’t happen, then the American people themselves will change Trump, because we can’t commit suicide.”
Following Uribe’s acquittal, Secretary of State Marco Rubio celebrated the news.
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“Colombia’s justice has prevailed as former President Uribe is absolved after years of the political witch hunt against him and his family,” Rubio said in a statement.
The Trump administration has remained informal allies with Uribe, who served in the Colombian presidency between 2002 and 2010 before Trump first arrived in office. Rubio has been particularly vocal against Uribe’s prior conviction, which he once condemned as “the weaponization of Colombia’s judicial branch.”