Petro’s comments appeared to be a response to the administration of President Donald Trump personally sanctioning him for his administration’s failure to properly address drug trafficking in Colombia which has resulted in record-high production and distribution of cocaine around the world, according to the United Nations. Colombia is the world’s most prolific exporter of cocaine.
According to the Argentine news outlet Infobae, Petro initially delivered the speech at a political on Friday, focusing his vitriol at the American government for accurately noting the dramatic rise in drug trafficking under his presidency.
“One does not order Colombia to kneel,” Petro wrote on the social media site Twitter, sharing the clip. “Free Colombia is beautiful and free.”
In his speech, Petro targeted Secretary of State Rubio — who has become a lightning rod for personal vitriol from the Latin American left in part due to his status as the first Hispanic top diplomat of the United States. The Colombian president suggested that Rubio is personally invested in arresting him and dared him to do so.
“So I have to say to Mr. Marco Rubio, brother, ‘If you are going to arrest me, let’s see if you can,’” Petro declared. “If you want to put me in the — what is it? — orange pajamas [jumpsuit]? Try it. But this people does not kneel. Your hate of the past, what I do not know nor is any other Colombian guilty of what happened to your grandfather or your father in Cuba.”
He then appeared to address the U.S. government generally, continuing, “You have to kneel, because here there is a jaguar about to awaken. Don’t threaten us, don’t deceive us, we know the plays.”
“Two centuries of knowing, going from war to war in this people. Wars of all kinds, for no reason sometimes,” Petro mused.
Colombia has endured seven decades of guerrilla warfare due to communist terrorist organizations in the country, most prominently the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN), who have been responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths. Petro himself was a member of a smaller Marxist guerrilla, the M-19 terrorist organization responsible for 1985 siege of the nation’s Supreme Court, resulting in nearly 100 deaths including those of 11 justices. Petro still proudly proclaims his association with the terrorist organization and has controversially used its insignia in government events.
Petro, who took office as president in 2022, has used his position to consistently antagonize the U.S. government since the return of President Trump to the White House after maintaining friendly relations with former President Joe Biden.
Tensions with Trump peaked in September when Petro traveled to New York to attend the United Nations General Assembly. At a pro-Hamas protest alongside prominent antisemite Roger Waters, Petro grabbed a megaphone and demanded the U.S. military stop following Trump’s orders as their commander-in-chief.
“From here in New York, I ask all soldiers in the U.S. Army not to point their guns at humanity. Disobey the orders of Trump. Obey the orders of humanity,” Petro said at the time.
The United States revoked Petro’s visa following the call to treason. A month later, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced that it would sanction Petro and several members of his family due to ties discovered between the president and drug-trafficking operations.
“Since President Gustavo Petro came to power, cocaine production in Colombia has exploded to the highest rate in decades, flooding the United States and poisoning Americans,” Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent noted at the time. “President Petro has allowed drug cartels to flourish and refused to stop this activity.”
Trump personally called Petro an “illegal drug dealer” in a message on his website, Truth Social, a week prior to the designation.
“It has become the biggest business in Colombia, by far, and Petro does nothing to stop it, despite large scale payments and subsidies from the USA that are nothing more than a long term rip-off of America,” he added.
Petro — whom his own officials have accused of drug addiction — responded to the designation by denying any ties to drug trafficking and publishing a report on his expenses to prove that he was not a drug deal. The report, published last week, raised a host of new questions about Petro’s trustworthiness as a president, however, as it revealed numerous visits to some of the world’s most expensive department stories and a stop at the Ménage Strip Club in Lisbon, Portugal, during an official visit to that country.
Petro responded to the mockery and outrage in response to his strip club expenses by insisting that they did not show any spending on drugs and publishing a bizarre screed on social media declaring that he was too seductive to have to pay for sex — a practice that is not the primary function of a strip club.
“I don’t need to buy sex, I don’t like it. I still have some capacity for seduction that allows me to avoid resorting to those practices of sad men,” Petro wrote. “Sexuality must always be combined with culture; that is called eroticism. I advise you to do so.”
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