Colombia’s Interior Minister, Armando Benedetti, has tackled the United States for revoking the visa of President Gustavo Petro.
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The US took the action, which some organisations have described as a violation of international law, after accusing the Colombian leader of “incendiary remarks”.
Speaking while addressing a group of pro-Palestine supporters outside the United Nations headquarters in New York, the Colombian president called for the formation of a “world salvation army, whose first task is to liberate Palestine”.
“That is why, from here in New York, I ask all soldiers in the United States Army not to point their rifles at humanity. Disobey Trump’s order! Obey the order of humanity!”
“As happened in the First World War, I want the young people, sons and daughters of workers and farmers, of both Israel and the United States, to point their rifles not toward humanity, but toward the tyrants and toward the fascists,” he said.
Petro was already on his way back to his country when the US announced it would cancel his visa.
But responding, the Colombian Minister said the Israeli Prime Minister’s visa should have been annulled rather than Petro’s.
“But since the empire protects him (Trump), it’s taking it out on the only president who was capable enough to tell him the truth to his face,” he said.
Petro struck a defiant note after leaving New York for Bogota, saying that he considered himself a “free person in the world.”
“I arrived in Bogota. I no longer have a visa to travel to the USA. I don’t care,” he wrote on social media early Saturday. He added that he was “not only a Colombian citizen but also a European citizen” which meant he would not require a visa but instead use the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) for entry into the United States.
The Colombian leader was in the US for the UN General Assembly, where earlier this week he called for a criminal inquiry into the Trump administration’s airstrikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean.
Relations between Petro – who leads Colombia’s first ever left-wing government – and the Trump administration have worsened in recent months.
The Colombian leader used his speech at the UN to launch an excoriating rebuke of US strikes on boats suspected of being used to transport drugs, arguing they were not about controlling the drug trade but serving a need to use “violence to dominate Colombia and Latin America”.
He said some of those killed by the strikes may have been from Colombia, which is the world’s biggest cocaine producer, and claimed US officials were allied to drug gangs while his government was persuading farmers to not grow coca.
Petro likened the air strikes to an “act of tyranny” in an interview with the BBC.
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