Treasury accuses Gustavo Petro of ‘allowing drug cartels to flourish’ as president attacks Trump’s ‘oppressive regime’
The US treasury department has announced sanctions on Colombian president Gustavo Petro, one of Donald Trump’s harshest international critics.
“President Petro has allowed drug cartels to flourish and refused to stop this activity,” treasury secretary Scott Bessent wrote in a post on X. “Today President Trump is taking strong action to protect our nation.”
In a response on X, Petro said that he has greatly reduced the growth rate of coca plantations in Colombia, and implied that the drug trade was not the United States’s underlying motivation behind the sanctions.
“My government has seized more cocaine than any in the entire history of the world.” Petro wrote in Spanish. “What the US treasury is doing is an arbitrariness typical of an oppressive regime.”
