Colombia’s Petro promises to defend homeland amid Trump threats

President criticizes Trump, calling US threats an undue interference successful Colombian interior matters nether planetary law.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro says helium would “take up arms” for his state if indispensable arsenic the United States issues threats against him and his government.

In a societal media station connected Monday, Petro, a erstwhile leftist fighter, said immoderate convulsive US involution successful Colombia, specified arsenic the benignant carried retired in Venezuela implicit the weekend, would provoke a response.

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“I swore not to interaction a limb again,” Petro said. “But for the homeland I volition instrumentality up arms again.”

Petro has emerged arsenic an outspoken professional of US President Donald Trump, who has threatened Colombia with imaginable subject strikes successful the sanction of combating cause trafficking.

The 2 leaders person often traded insults, but Trump’s threats person go progressively hostile successful caller days.

The US president said implicit the play that Petro should “watch his a**” aft the abduction of Venezuelan person Nicolas Maduro, an enactment wide considered amerciable by scholars of planetary law. Speaking with reporters connected Sunday, Trump said a akin cognition against Petro’s authorities “sounds bully to me”.

“Colombia is precise sick, too, tally by a sick man, who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States, and he’s not going to beryllium doing it precise long,” Trump said.

Colombia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs denounced Trump’s comments arsenic “an undue interference successful the interior affairs of the country, against the norms of planetary law”.

Trump has accused Petro of facilitating the trafficking of drugs to the US, a assertion for which determination is nary grounds and is firmly denied by Petro, who says his authorities has worked to combat cause accumulation portion taking steps distant from the militarised attack of the warfare connected drugs.

“I person tremendous spot successful my people,” Petro said. “And that is wherefore I person asked the radical to support the president from immoderate illegitimate convulsive enactment against him.”