Colombian president says ‘I will take up arms again’ if US invades

Donald Trump and his Colombian counterpart have turned up the volume of their war of words, further raising tensions between the two countries after US forces attacked Venezuela to remove Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro from power.Speaking to reporters on Air Force One on Sunday, the US president threatened similar military action against Colombia, saying the South American country is “very sick too” and “run by a sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States.”“He has cocaine mills and cocaine factories and is not going to be doing it very long,” Trump added.While Colombia is the world’s largest producer of cocaine there is no evidence that President Gustavo Petro, who was elected in 2022, is in any way involved in the business.The country has long been a close partner of the US in the fight against drug trafficking and enjoyed bipartisan support in Washington but relations have soured dramatically since Trump came to office.Colombia’s narcotics trade is largely controlled by illegal armed groups such as the Golf Clan, the National Liberation Army (ELN) and dissident factions of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) guerrilla group, the majority of whose members demobilised after a 2016 peace deal.When asked whether military intervention similar to Venezuela was on the cards for Colombia, Trump said: “It sounds good to me.”Petro, a former leftist guerrilla who demobilised in the 1990s, rejected the accusations, saying:“I am not illegitimate and I am not a narco,.“Trump speaks without knowledge. Stop slandering me,” he wrote in a post on X.“If they [the US] bomb peasants, they will become thousands of guerrillas in the mountains. And if they detain the president which a large part of the country loves and respects, they will unleash the ‘jaguar’ of the people,” Petro warned.Petro spent part of his youth as a member of the leftist M-19 guerrilla group but is not believed to have ever participated in combat. After demobilizing, he participated in drafting a new constitution in 1991 and later became a respected lawmaker. He was mayor of the Colombian capital before being elected president.“I swore not to touch a weapon again ... but for the homeland I will take up arms again,” he said.The Colombian defence minister, Pedro Sánchez, announced Saturday that the president’s security detail had been reinforced.Many among Colombia’s right wing opposition have allied themselves with Trump, but voices from across the political spectrum have rejected the threats of a US attack on Colombia.The US revoked the Petro’s visa in September after he called on American soldiers to disobey any illegal orders. In October, it placed financial sanctions on Petro, his wife and several close collaborators.At the same time the US was building up its military presence in the Caribbean and bombing suspected drug boats to put pressure on Venezuela’s Maduro, US forces have also conducted strikes on boats in the eastern Pacific region off the Colombian coast.