Far-left President of Colombia Gustavo Petro claimed on Thursday that Colombia must prepare to face possible international conflicts because, according to him, “the bombs falling in Gaza will also fall here.”
Petro delivered the prediction in remarks given at the opening of an official two-day conference of the Colombian Supreme Court of Justice. Although the judicial event is of an academic nature, Petro, who has maintained an aggressive anti-Israel stance since the aftermath of Hamas’ October 7 terrorist attack, chose instead to opine on the ongoing conflict, claiming that it would extend to the South American nation.
“Beneath the bureaucrats in the offices of the United Nations, beneath the double conscience of Europeans who murdered Jews and now expel Jews from their land to make them allies in murdering another people who are no longer Jews, but Palestinians,” Petro said.
“And they learn how to drop bombs without guilt and sign and applaud as if they were in the bullrings of Latin countries applauding death. They became so accustomed to applauding death that now they applaud the death of babies. And aren’t those bombs going to fall on us?” he continued.
Petro then asserted that Colombians have “not built themselves up peacefully, but violently,” and that finding peace in the years of the country’s history has been almost “like finding an oasis, while violence has been the norm.”
“Doesn’t our history show us that perhaps the bombs falling there [in Gaza] will also fall here, and that they are already being announced?” Petro posited, without explaining how his claim would come to pass, and added, “They are simply threatening us, and that we should therefore prepare ourselves, intellectually and physically as well.”
The far-left president asked participants, “What are the dangers that loom over us and how should we respond as a society, as children of [Venezuelan founding father Simón] Bolívar and as Latin Americans, not Westerners?”
“We know about the West and we understand it, but we also know about Africa and we understand it. And we also know about the Arabs and we understand them. Because all blood is in our hands, in our veins. Not shed by us, but intertwined like cultures that we can understand amid our own diversity,” Petro said.
For decades, Colombia and Israel maintained friendly ties that have been single-handedly strained by Petro, who unilaterally cut off all diplomatic ties with Israel and shut down its embassy in 2024, replacing it with a new one in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
Petro’s rupture of Colombia’s ties with Israel was preceded by a months-long fierce international condemnation campaign launched by the Colombian president against Israel over its self-defense operations against Hamas. Days after October 7, 2023, Petro claimed that Israel’s actions were comparable to the actions of Nazi Germany during World War II and accused Israel of turning Gaza into a concentration camp like Auschwitz.
Israel responded to Petro’s accusations at the time by issuing a halt on its security exports to Colombia, crucial in the South American nation’s decades-long fight against Marxist terrorist groups such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), National Liberation Army (ELN), and M19, a former Marxist terror group to which Petro belonged, and of which he still speaks highly.
Colombia was also a longtime supplier of coal to Israel. In August 2024, Petro signed a decree banning coal sales to Israel under the alleged premise that Israel used Colombian coal to “make bombs to kill Palestinian children.”
Colombian officials appeared to ignore Petro’s ban and continued to export the mineral until July, when Petro claimed that “whites, descendants of slave owners” betrayed his orders and had the original ban revised. At the time, Colombian coal sector representatives refuted Petro’s claims that Israel used Colombian coal to “make bombs” and explained that 95 percent of the exported coal was bituminous and, because of that, Israel used it for power generation, including providing power to the Gaza Strip.
Petro denounced the “betrayal” of his coal ban on Israel during his participation at an event organized by the anti-Israel coalition “Hague Group” hosted by the Colombian government. The conference included the participation of United Nations “Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories” Francesca Albanese, who urged the destruction of Israel’s economy at the event. Petro also met with Albanese at the Colombian presidential palace and described her as a “hero of humanity.”
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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