Colombian President Gustavo Petro said that the US Treasury Department's claim that cocaine production in the country is increasing is false.
„What the US Treasury Department is saying is a lie. During my administration, cocaine production has not increased; on the contrary, my administration has confiscated more cocaine than ever before,” he wrote in X.
Petro claims to have reduced the growth rate of coca leaf cultivation, which reached 230,000 hectares under the administration of Colombia’s previous president, from 42% to 13% in 2022, to 9% in 2023 and to 3% in 2024. He stressed that of the 260,000 hectares of such land in 2024, 80,000 had been abandoned for more than three years, while another 22,000 were under agricultural production.
On October 24, the US Treasury Department announced its decision to impose sanctions on Petro, his wife and his son.
On October 23, US President Donald Trump stated that Colombia and Mexico were completely under the control of drug cartels. For his part, Petro, in an interview with Univision, said that the world should either replace Trump or "get rid of him". Commenting on these statements, Trump called his Colombian counterpart "a bandit and a bad person" and urged him to be careful with his language, threatening to take "serious action" if he did not.