Colombia’s president calls for criminal investigation against Trump over Caribbean strikes

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — Colombian President Gustavo Petro on Tuesday called for a criminal investigation against U.S. President Donald Trump and other officials involved in this month’s deadly strikes on boats in the Caribbean that the White House has said were transporting drugs.

Petro repudiated the three attacks in his speech at the annual meeting of the U.N. General Assembly during which he also accused Trump of criminalizing poverty and migration.

“Criminal proceedings must be opened against those officials, who are from the U.S., even if it includes the highest-ranking official who gave the order: President Trump,” Petro said of the strikes, adding that boat passengers were not members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang as claimed by the Trump administration after the first attack.

If the boats were carrying drugs as alleged by the U.S. government, Petro said, their passengers “were not drug traffickers; they were simply poor young people from Latin America who had no other option.”

Petro’s comments came shortly after Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro announced that his government is preparing a series of constitutional decrees to defend the country’s sovereignty in the event of an “attack” from U.S. forces.

Few details are known about the deadly strikes, the first of which took place Sept. 2 and killed 11 people, according to the Trump administration. U.S. officials have said that boat and another vessel targeted Sept. 16 had set out to sea from Venezuela. Three people died in the second attack.

The U.S. military struck a third boat Friday, killing three people.

The Trump administration has justified the military action as a necessary escalation to stem the flow of drugs into the United States. It has yet to explain how the military assessed the boats’ cargo and determined the alleged gang affiliation of passengers.

U.S. national security officials told members of Congress that the first boat taken out was fired on multiple times after it had changed course and appeared headed back to shore.

“They said that the missiles in the Caribbean were used to stop drug trafficking. That is a lie stated here in this very rostrum,” Petro said Tuesday in what appeared to be a direct reference to Trump, who spoke hours earlier. “Was it really necessary to bomb unarmed, poor young people in the Caribbean?”

Maduro has accused the Trump administration of using drug trafficking accusations as an excuse for a military operation whose intentions are to oust his government.

Petro, Colombia’s first leftist president, restarted his country’s diplomatic relations with Venezuela after taking office in 2022.