Colombia has finally drawn Donald Trump’s ire

“President Gustavo Petro, of Columbia [sic], is an illegal-drug leader,” Donald Trump declared on social media on October 19th. He promised to end all aid to Colombia and to impose tariffs on the country’s exports. Mr Trump also threatened to take military action on Colombia’s “killing fields”, referring to the 253,000 hectares of coca-leaf plantation, much of which is used to make cocaine.

The outburst against Mr Petro (who is not an “illegal-drug leader”) seems to have been triggered by his accusation, a day earlier, that an American military strike on a small boat in the Caribbean on September 15th had killed an innocent Colombian fisherman. The United States has bombed at least nine small boats since September as part of a campaign against drug-traffickers, killing at least 37 people in a series of strikes that are almost certainly illegal. On October 17th the United States struck a boat which it claimed was affiliated with ELN, a Colombian rebel group that traffics serious amounts of cocaine and has been designated as a terrorist organisation by the United States. On October 21st it struck a boat in the Pacific, off Colombia’s coast. Until then the Trump administration had claimed that its targets were moving drugs out of Venezuela, which has no Pacific coast.

As long as it remains only verbal, the fight with Mr Trump may well help Mr Petro at home, turning voters away from right-wing pro-Trump candidates in the presidential election next year. Mr Petro often claims that the right is in league with Mr Trump to topple his government. This came into focus on October 21st, when the conviction of a right-wing former president, Álvaro Uribe, for bribery and witness tampering was overturned. Mr Petro immediately said that Mr Trump, “allied with these politicians and with Uribe”, would seek sanctions against him.

Mr Trump may find it tricky to fulfil his social-media promises on tariffs and aid cuts. Colombia has long been America’s closest ally in the region. Without the country’s co-operation, Mr Trump’s new war on drugs would get even harder. ■