Socialist President of Colombia Gustavo Petro published a meandering social media post at 1:28 a.m. local time in which he claimed he was ready to “take up arms” if necessary to fight President Donald Trump, accusing him of making “illegitimate threats” against Bogotá.
Petro is a radical Marxist leader and a member of the defunct guerrilla terrorist organization M19, responsible for killing dozens of Colombians during their active period. The deadliest attack attributed to them was the 1985 siege of the Bogotá Justice Palace, the supreme court, in which 11 Colombian Supreme Court justices and nearly 100 people total were killed. Petro regularly boasts of his membership in that organization and uses terrorist insignia in his public appearances.
The Colombian president’s remarks were apparently a response to President Donald Trump condemning Petro in remarks to the press on Sunday night. Speaking on Air Force One, Trump described Petro – whose former cabinet members have accused him of drug addiction – as a “sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States.”
“He has cocaine mills and cocaine factories. He’s not going to be doing it very long,” Trump warned. Trump’s remarks carried extra heft a day after the United States military successfully completed a special mission to apprehend and extradite the former dictator of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, and wife Cilia Flores to face charges in a New York court on Saturday. Petro is a longtime supporter of both the Maduro regime and of legalizing cocaine.
Trump’s comments against Petro followed similar comments during the press conference on Saturday in which Trump took questions about the Maduro arrest. Trump accused Petro of profiting from “cocaine mills” and advised, “he does have to watch his ass.”
In his essay published on Twitter in the early morning hours of Monday, Petro claimed that he would only address “Trump’s illegitimate threat” at some unspecified “later” time. He then proceeded to address the alleged threat.
Petro boasted that he had “ordered the largest seizure of cocaine in the history of the world” – a fact, though heavily caveated by the fact that global cocaine production has hit record highs during Petro’s time in office, which began in 2022. He also discussed extensively his membership in the M19 terrorist organization.
“My movement, M19, previously taking up insurgent arms, won the first relative vote by lists of elected constituents by the people,” he claimed, referring to the politicization of the guerrilla following their disarmament.
“If you detain a president that a good part of my people loves and respects, you will unleash the jaguar of the people,” Petro continued, threatening Trump.
“Although I have not been a soldier, I know about war and clandestine operations,” Petro continued. “I swore not to touch a weapon again since the 1989 peace agreement, but for the Fatherland I will take up arms again, which I do not want to do.”
“I am not illegitimate, nor am I a narco, I just have as my assets my family home that I pay still with my salary,” Petro asserted. “My bank withdrawals have been published. Nobody can say that I spent more than my salary. I am not greedy.”
Petro did publish his expenditures in November in an attempt to prove he was not involved in drug trafficking. Instead, he created a political scandal for himself by revealing that he had spent lavishly while on international visits, most prominently at the Ménage Strip Club in Lisbon, Portugal, in 2023.
Petro’s Twitter rant continued by declaring that he had called upon the Colombian people to defend him should Trump order a Maduro-style extraction.
“I have an enormous confidence in my people and that is why I have asked the people to defend the president from any illegitimate violent act against him,” he wrote. “The way of defending me is to take power in all the municipalities of the country. The order to the public forces is to not shoot at the people and yes at the invader.”
In a separate Twitter screed on Sunday night, Petro mused that he did not “know if Maduro is good or bad, or even if he is a drug trafficker,” claiming that his name did not appear in any Colombian law enforcement records. He admitted within the same paragraph that Maduro and Flores had indeed been accused in Colombia but dismissed it as rumors from the “generals of the Venezuelan opposition … seeking to override the popular vote.”
Petro recognizes Maduro as the president of Venezuela despite him not legally being head of state since at least 2018. That year, the National Assembly, the state legislature, constitutionally declared a “rupture in the democratic order” after Maduro held a sham election in which he did not allow true opposition figures to compete. He held a similar sham election in 2024, but opposition leader María Corina Machado organized a group operation to count vote tallies at local ballot centers, proving that opposition candidate Edmundo González decisively defeated Maduro.
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