Colombia’s foreign ministry said on Monday the country has recalled its ambassador from the United States after President Donald Trump said he would raise tariffs on the South American nation and stop all payments to it, in a feud stemming from U.S. military strikes on vessels allegedly transporting drugs.
Trump also called Colombian President Gustavo Petro an “illegal drug leader” on Sunday, which Petro’s government described as offensive.
“Daniel Garcia-Pena, Ambassador of Colombia in the United States of America, has been recalled for consultations by President Gustavo Petro and is now in Bogota,” the Colombian foreign ministry said. “In the coming hours the national government will inform of the decisions taken.”
Trump’s drug leader comments marked a new low in relations between Washington and Bogota, which Trump accuses of being complicit in the illicit drug trade.
Petro has objected to the U.S. military’s deadly strikes against vessels in the Caribbean, which the Trump administration has characterized as necessary to avoid an imminent threat to Americans stemming from “narcoterrorists” connected to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Many legal experts and human rights activists have also condemned the military actions and questioned their legality, as the U.S. has sought to characterize drug traffickers on boats as unlawful combatants.
What’s President Donald Trump’s endgame with repeated U.S. strikes on boats near Venezuela? Andrew Chang breaks down the threats the Trump administration says it’s reacting to and why Venezuela’s relationship with China may also be a factor.
Images provided by Getty Images, The Canadian Press and Reuters.
Largest trading partner
Trump said U.S. financial aid to Colombia would be cut off and details about the new tariffs would be unveiled on Monday, but it was not clear what funding Trump was referring to.
Colombia was once among the largest recipients of U.S. aid in the Western Hemisphere, but the flow of money was suddenly curtailed this year by the shuttering of USAID, the U.S. government’s humanitarian arm.
Colombia currently pays 10 per cent tariffs on most imports to the United States, the baseline level Trump has imposed on many countries.
The U.S. is Colombia’s top trading partner, and shipments north account for 35 per cent of the South American country’s exports, according to the Colombian-American Chamber of Commerce.
Colombia, a big exporter of oil, coal, coffee, flowers and bananas, posted a $338-million trade deficit US with the U.S. between January and July, according to government statistics agency DANE.
‘Rude and ignorant’
Petro on Sunday condemned the bombing of a vessel that killed three people on Friday, saying the boat belonged to a “humble family,” and not the leftist National Liberation Army rebel group, as claimed by U.S. Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth in his own comments.
“Mr. Trump, Colombia has never been rude to the United States … but you are rude and ignorant to Colombia,” Petro said on X. “Since I am not a businessman, I am even less a drug trafficker. There is no greed in my heart.”
In the shadow of a fentanyl crisis, the global cocaine market has exploded, unleashing an avalanche of highly pure cocaine reaching remote regions of Canada. Watch as CBC follows the path of cocaine from a ship off the coast of Colombia, all the way to Sheshatshiu Innu First Nation in Labrador.
Petro has pledged to tame coca-growing regions in the country with massive social and military intervention, but the strategy has brought little success.
He has said that the country’s anti-drug efforts are “to stop North American society from smearing its noses” in cocaine.
Growth in coca crops
Republican and Democratic administrations have sent billions in foreign assistance to Colombia since the 1990s to eradicate illegal coca crops, strengthen its armed forces in the fight against drug-fuelled rebels and provide economic alternatives to poor farmers who are on the lowest rungs of the cocaine industry.
But Colombia court rulings determined the U.S.-funded program of spraying coca fields with the herbicide glyphosate was potentially harmful to the environment and farmers.
The amount of land in Colombia dedicated to cultivating coca, the base ingredient of cocaine, has almost tripled in the past decade to a record 253,000 hectares in 2023, according to the latest report available from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.
The U.S., which has built up its military presence in the Caribbean, has provided little information about the boat strikes so far, including the quantity of drugs the vessels carried or any details about the individuals killed.
After the first strike, announced on Sept. 2, the Trump administration cited the gang Tren de Aragua for being at the root of illicit drug dealing, operating under the auspices of Maduro, an allegation the Venezuelan president denies. Tren de Aragua originated more than a decade ago at an infamously lawless prison in the central state of Aragua.
Maduro and other government officials have repeatedly cited a United Nations report that they say shows traffickers attempt to move only five per cent of the cocaine produced in Colombia through Venezuela.
The latest UN World Drug Report does not assign Venezuela the outsize role that the White House has claimed in recent months, and Mexico has been seen as a greater source of fentanyl and its byproducts, which have accounted for the majority of drug-related deaths in the U.S. in recent years.
U.S. repatriates boat strike survivors
Democratic lawmakers and Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky are among those calling for more information on the recent U.S. strikes, which have killed at least 32 people since early September, when the first reported incident led to the deaths of 11 people.
“All of these people have been blown up without us knowing their name, without any evidence of a crime,” Paul told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday.
The U.S. opted not to detain two survivors of one of the boat strikes, but to repatriate them in recent days, to Colombia and Ecuador.
“The attacks on the boats in the Caribbean have been illegal. If the survivors had appeared in either court or a military tribunal that would have instantly been made clear,” Democratic Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut said.
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