Colombia to maintain US intelligence-sharing to fight drug trafficking | Drugs News

The announcement comes after President Petro said Colombia would stop working with US over strikes on alleged drug boats.

Officials in Colombia say the country will continue to share intelligence with international agencies combatting drug trafficking, just days after President Gustavo Petro said he was suspending such collaboration with the United States over attacks on vessels in international waters.

Colombian Defence Minister Pedro Arnulfo Sanchez said in a social media post on Thursday that Petro had provided “clear instructions” to maintain a “continuous flow of information” with international agencies working on drug trafficking.

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“Against transnational crime, the answer is international cooperation,” Sanchez wrote on X.

The country’s interior minister, Armando Benedetti, also said in a separate statement that there had been “a misunderstanding” and Petro never said that US security agencies would stop working in Colombia alongside their Colombian counterparts.

“We will continue working as this Government has done against drug trafficking and crime with the United States,” Benedetti said on social media.

The apparent about-face comes after Petro — a left-wing leader and vocal critic of US President Donald Trump — said on Tuesday that an order had been issued “to suspend communications and other dealings with US security agencies”.

Petro has been critical of a series of deadly US attacks on boats in the Caribbean Sea that the Trump administration accused of smuggling illegal drugs.

The strikes have prompted widespread condemnation, with United Nations officials and other experts saying they amount to clear violations of international law.

“These attacks — and their mounting human cost — are unacceptable,” Volker Turk, the UN human rights chief, said in late October.

“The US must halt such attacks and take all measures necessary to prevent the extrajudicial killing of people aboard these boats, whatever the criminal conduct alleged against them.”

The Trump administration has rejected the criticism, saying its attacks in the Caribbean and the Pacific aim to deter drug traffickers. The US bombing campaign, which began in September, has killed at least 76 people to date.

Trump, without providing any evidence, also has accused Petro of being involved in drug trafficking, imposing sanctions on the Colombian president and his family last month.

The Colombian leader has, in turn, called for Trump to be investigated for war crimes linked to the attacks, which have affected citizens from Venezuela, Ecuador, Colombia and Trinidad and Tobago.

Petro also has accused Washington of going after peasants growing coca, the base ingredient of cocaine, instead of targeting major drug traffickers and money launderers.

On Sunday, Petro said that he met with the family of a Colombian fisherman who was allegedly killed in one of the US strikes.

“He may have been carrying fish, or he may have been carrying cocaine, but he had not been sentenced to death,” Petro said during a summit between Latin American and European leaders hosted by Colombia. “There was no need to murder him.”

US news outlet CNN reported earlier this week that the United Kingdom had suspended some intelligence-sharing with the US over its strikes on the boats in the Caribbean.

But US Secretary of State Marco Rubio rejected that report. Without going into any details or explaining what about CNN’s reporting was inaccurate, Rubio told reporters on Wednesday that the story was “fake”.