Colombian President Gustavo Petro accused the United States of allying with Colombian “drug traffickers” after US President Donald Trump expressed his support for the far-right candidate Abelardo de la Espriella for the upcoming second round of Colombia’s presidential elections on June 21.

“His allies in Colombia come from narco-paramilitary governance. They are genociders and drug traffickers. For ten years, I demonstrated this in Congress,” Petro said in an interview on Thursday, June 4.

In the interview, he said that foreign political figures and governments that claim to want to fight drug trafficking are “precisely helping to bring crime to political power in Colombia.”

He added that Trump had breached a prior agreement not to interfere in the Colombian elections. This agreement had supposedly been reached during Petro’s official visit to the US in February this year.

“The US is trying to impose an ideological policy that divides the world between those who think like the US and those who do not,” the Colombian president said.

The relationship between Washington and Bogotá has been notably strained during Petro’s term. President Petro has clashed with Trump on multiple occasions due to the United States’ interventionist policy, aggression against other countries, extrajudicial killings via strikes on small boats at sea, repression against migrants in the US, and the economic, commercial, and financial blockade against Cuba.

Trump went so far as to label his Colombian counterpart a “drug-trafficking leader” and imposed severe financial sanctions on Colombia, whose government he baselessly accused of not doing enough to combat drug trafficking.

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Second round of Colombian presidential elections
In the runoff scheduled for June 21, Abelardo de la Espriella will face the leftist Iván Cepeda, the latter backed by the governing party.

According to the highly criticized preliminary results of the first round held on May 31, De la Espriella, from the far-right Defenders of the Homeland party, obtained 43.74% of the vote. Meanwhile, Cepeda, from the progressive bloc Historic Pact, won 40.90%.

(Telesur)

Translation: Orinoco Tribune

OT/SC/SF

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