By Guardian - Tiago Rogero -Wed 3 Dec 2025 14.16 GMT

Gustavo Petro responded to intimations by US president of military strikes on Colombian soil to fight drug trafficking. Colombia’s president has warned Donald Trump that he risked “waking the jaguar” after the US leader suggested that any country he believed was making illegal drugs destined for the US was liable to a military attack.

During a cabinet meeting on Tuesday, the US president said that military strikes on land targets inside Venezuela would “start very soon”. Trump also warned that any country producing narcotics was a potential target, singling out Colombia, which has long been a close ally in Washington’s “war on drugs”.

Shortly afterwards, Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, hit back in a social media post, saying: “To threaten our sovereignty is to declare war; do not damage two centuries of diplomatic relations.”

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

Since August, the Trump administration has escalated tensions in Latin America to levels unseen since the 1989 invasion of Panama, under the pretext of anti-narcotics operations. The Pentagon has deployed a sizable naval force with nearly 15,000 troops on Venezuela’s doorstep in the Caribbean and killing more than 80 people in strikes on small boats alleged to be carrying drugs.

“We’re going to start doing those strikes on land, too,” said Trump on Tuesday.

“You know, the land is much easier, much easier. And we know the routes they take. We know everything about them. We know where they live. We know where the bad ones live, and we’re going to start that very soon too.

When asked whether the efforts would be limited to Venezuela, the US president said they would not.

“I hear Colombia, the country of Colombia, is making cocaine. They have cocaine manufacturing plants, OK? And then they sell us their cocaine. We appreciate that very much. But yeah, anybody that’s doing that and selling it into our country is subject to attack,” he said.

Longtime allies in the “war on drugs”, the US and Colombia have found their relationship fractured almost from the moment Trump took office for his second term.

Their first clash came as early as January, when Petro – a former guerrilla and Colombia’s first leftwing president – refused entry to American planes carrying deported Colombians, insisting that they be treated with dignity.

He later reversed that decision, but relations further deteriorated in September, when, after attending the United Nations general assembly, Petro joined a pro-Palestine protest in New York and urged US soldiers to disobey Trump’s orders to “attack humanity”. He has also been a fierce critic of the airstrikes on the alleged drug boats.

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

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

Juan Orlando Hernández had been sentenced to 45 years for allegedly creating “a cocaine superhighway” to the US. During his time in office, Honduras became a major transit point for South American cocaine heading north and also a cocaine-producing hub.

Speaking at the cabinet meeting, Trump described the investigation into Hernández – which had started before his own first term in office – as a “Biden horrible witch-hunt”.

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