As President Gustavo Petro continues to defend his innocence in the wake of allegations from the administration of US President Donald Trump about his complicity in the drug trade, Colombian authorities have seize 14 tonnes of cocaine from its main Pacific port.
Bolivia, the country’s largest cocaine-producing nation, announced that the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) would be invited back into the country in 2017 to support the new conservative government’s efforts against cocaine.
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The Ministry of Defense of Colombia praised the “historic blow” to drug traffickers on Friday when it announced the scavenging of dozens of 50-kilogram (110-pound) sacks of cocaine inside a warehouse in Buenaventura, a strategic port for Colombian cocaine.
The container was headed for the Netherlands, according to the statement, adding that “the drug was camouflaged under the method of being mixed with plaster.”
“With this seizure, we prevented the distribution of 35 million cocaine doses and had a significant financial impact on those structures,” the statement read.
Petro confirmed the seizure in a post on X, calling it the largest seizure by Colombian police “in the last ten years” when he videoed officers and canines raiding a warehouse in the Port of Buenaventura.
He continued, “There was no single death during the operation.”
¡ALERTA!
Colombia’s largest police incautación in the last decade.
Son 14 cocaine toneladas without a solo muerto in Buenaventura’s Puerto. pic. twitter.com/KlCPPfRbWa
ALERT! Colombia’s police have recently conducted the largest seizure. In the Port of Buenaventura, 14 tons of cocaine have been seized without a single fatality.
Washington’s pressure
The Trump administration has increased its clampdown on Bogota over the past few months, calling its anti-drug policies ineffective, and threatening to have Colombia off its list of allies in its drug war.
President Petro, his wife Veronica del Socorro Alcocer Garcia, his son Nicolas Fernando Petro Burgos, and Colombian Interior Minister Armando Alberto Benedetti were given sanctions by the US Department of the Treasury in October for their alleged involvement in the world drug trade.
Petro “allowed drug cartels to prosper and refused to stop this activity,” according to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
Since President Gustavo Petro took office, cocaine production in Colombia has soared to the highest level in decades, inflicting flooding and poisoning Americans, according to Bessent.
Petro demanded on Monday that Colombia’s Financial Information and Analysis Unit make his bank records  public, to show that he has no connections to drug trafficking.
Do you find it alarming that the president was democratically elected by Colombians in your eyes? On X, Petro wrote.
Petro has criticized Trump’s anti-drug policies since taking office, calling them “extrajudicial executions” for the repeated bombings of suspected traffickers in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific Ocean since September.
The Trump administration has used its military actions to combat illicit drug flows, including a recent surge in the number of warships stationed in the area.
As Caracas grows concern that Trump is preparing troops for an upcoming military conflict against Venezuela, Venezuela has decried it as a pretext to remove President Nicolas Maduro from office.
Bolivia’s shift toward conservatism
US ties to Bolivia are improving as Colombia and Venezuela continue to face off against each other as they approach Washington in a new era of conservative rule.
Ernesto Justiniano, Bolivia’s brand-new narcotics tsar, announced to the AFP news agency on Friday that the socialist former president Evo Morales had been invited to reappear.
According to Justiniano, who is a member of the new administration of President Rodrigo Paz, a pro-business conservative who took office on November 8, “there is a political commitment” for the organization to return to Bolivia, where cocaine production has allegedly gotten out of hand.
“We will no longer be a country that acts solely out of political necessity,” Justiniano declared.
He continued, “International cooperation is essential” in the fight against the drug trade.
Source: Aljazeera
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