Colombian President Gustavo Petro denounced President Donald Trump as a “barbarian,” escalating a feud between the two leaders over the United States’s approach to targeting drugs flowing from South America.
Earlier this week, Petro ordered his country to stop sharing intelligence with Washington due to his outrage at Trump for authorizing around 20 military strikes on boats off the coast of the continent suspected to be carrying drug cartel members and illegal narcotics to the U.S. The Pentagon’s most recent strike was on Wednesday and killed four people.
The same day, the Colombian president defended his decision, arguing, “Intelligence is not for killing.”
“The most key thing is intelligence” in combating the drug trade, Petro said during an interview with NBC News. “The more we coordinate intelligence, the better. That is what I have been doing. But intelligence is not for killing.”
The Trump administration has received criticism from a range of lawmakers and countries for carrying out the lethal strikes without more evidence of criminality. The United Nations has claimed the strikes “violate international human rights law” after the Pentagon targeted a series of alleged drug boats, largely in the Caribbean waters off the Venezuelan coasts. Strikes have killed around seven dozen people whom the Trump administration believes to be “narcoterrorists” trafficking drugs into the U.S.
The Pentagon has accused Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s regime of deliberately funneling drugs into the U.S. that have killed many. And the State Department last month sanctioned Colombia over the matter, calling Petro a “former guerrilla member” and saying his policies amount to the “appeasement and emboldening of narcoterrorists” in the region.
Petro has sought to cast blame on Trump over the drug war, saying on Wednesday the president “wants to frighten us.”
HERE ARE THE DETAILS OF THE US STRIKES TARGETING ALLEGED DRUG VESSELS
The State Department has pushed back against suggestions that the Trump administration is targeting the innocent.
“Bottom line, these are drug boats,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said last month. “If people want to stop seeing drug boats blow up, stop sending drugs to the United States.”
