President Donald Trump announced Sunday that the United States will suspend all foreign aid to Colombia following harsh criticism from Colombian President Gustavo Petro over recent U.S. military strikes on drug-trafficking boats.
The decision, revealed in a Truth Social post, marks a sharp escalation in tensions between Washington and Bogotá and underscores the Trump administration’s uncompromising approach to global narcotics enforcement.
Trump said the move was necessary to end what he described as years of wasteful spending and Colombian inaction against the drug trade.
“President Gustavo Petro, of Colombia, is an illegal drug leader strongly encouraging the massive production of drugs, in big and small fields, all over Colombia,” Trump wrote. “It has become the biggest business in Colombia, by far, and Petro does nothing to stop it, despite large scale payments and subsidies from the USA that are nothing more than a long term rip off of America.”
“AS OF TODAY, THESE PAYMENTS, OR ANY OTHER FORM OF PAYMENT, OR SUBSIDIES, WILL NO LONGER BE MADE TO COLOMBIA,” Trump added.
The president’s statement followed Petro’s accusation that the United States had committed “murder” in a Saturday social media post referencing a September U.S. strike on a suspected drug-smuggling vessel. Petro’s comments drew swift condemnation from Trump, who argued that the Colombian leader’s rhetoric only emboldened drug traffickers.
“The purpose of this drug production is the sale of massive amounts of product into the United States, causing death, destruction, and havoc,” Trump wrote. “Petro, a low rated and very unpopular leader, with a fresh mouth toward America, better close up these killing fields immediately, or the United States will close them up for him, and it won’t be done nicely.”
The White House’s decision came just hours after Secretary of War Pete Hegseth released a video showing U.S. forces striking a vessel suspected of trafficking narcotics.
Hegseth said the three-man crew aboard the boat had ties to the National Liberation Army (Ejército de Liberación Nacional, or ELN), a Colombian terrorist organization that has long financed its operations through drug smuggling.
The strike was one of several conducted by the U.S. military under Trump’s renewed anti-cartel campaign.
Since early September, American forces have targeted multiple vessels linked to criminal networks operating out of South America and the Caribbean. The first of these, on September 2, destroyed a boat carrying 11 members of the Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua (TdA).
While the strikes have drawn criticism from Democrats and libertarian-leaning Republicans such as Senator Rand Paul, the Senate voted earlier this month to block a measure that would have curtailed the operations.
Trump has framed the actions as essential to national security, linking the spread of foreign narcotics to the surge in overdose deaths and border instability inside the United States.
Within hours of taking office in January, he issued an executive order designating several major criminal organizations—including Mexican drug cartels, TdA, and the El Salvadoran gang MS-13—as foreign terrorist groups.
For Trump, halting aid to Colombia is both symbolic and strategic: a message that the U.S. will no longer bankroll governments that, in his words, “do nothing to stop” the flow of deadly drugs north.
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