President Gustavo Petro recalled Colombia’s ambassador in the United States for the second time in a month over an alleged plot to falsely link him to drug trafficking organizations.
Petro made the decision after news publication Cambio published a photo taken by the White House that shows a Trump administration official holding open a folder with an image of Petro and his Venezuelan counterpart Nicolas Maduro in orange prison uniforms.
Apart from the image, the document called “The Trump Doctrine for Colombia and the Western Heisphere” proposed, among other things, “comprehensive investigations into Petro’s campaign finances.”
The document’s footer showed the logo of US Senator Bernie Moreno, whose family has been accused by the president of involvement in money laundering and other white collar crime scandals.
Bernie Moreno’s older brother laundered Bogota Cartel money, says Petro
The photo was apparently taken on October 21, amid tensions between the two governments, and removed from the White House’s online gallery as diplomats tried to improve relations.
The image can still be found on the White House server and is “a brutal disrespect to the people who elected me, to the Colombian nation, and to its history,” Petro said on Twitter.
The issue here is why the White House’s official website portrays me as if I were a prisoner in a US jail. That is a brutal disrespect to the people who elected me, to the Colombian nation, and to its history.
President Gustavo Petro
Moreno, said the president, “is now taking revenge by making me out to be a drug trafficker,” because of Petro’s money laundering and corruption allegations leveled at the Colombia-born senator’s family.
This has become a national security issue. One of the objectives being pursued is to arrest the president of Colombia without him having committed any crime, even though I have devoted a decade of my parliamentary life and eight years of my life as a government official to uncovering, with names and surnames, the ties that bind Colombia’s traditional political power to drug trafficking.
President Gustavo Petro
The US Government did not immediately respond to Petro’s objections to the White House image.
