🇨🇴✔️🇺🇸 — 🇻🇪 The president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, officially acknowledges that the United States bombed an ELN factory in Maracaibo, Venezuela, and contradicts Nicolás Maduro, who denies that this happened:

“It turns out that many boats attacked with missiles, as is happening in the seizures we carry out in Colombia or, with our help, outside Colombia, were not carrying cocaine but cannabis.

A paradoxical problem: in the U.S., in many places it is legal. And the Colombian Congress should not have allowed its illegality; it was lost by one vote. That vote has taken the lives of many humble boatmen, and not of a single U.S. consumer or consumer anywhere in the world. Trump is completely wrong. Cocaine to Europe is moving by submarine and container. Cannabis is what is being illegitimately attacked.

The ELN in Catatumbo, and the 33rd Front, must decide whether they are going to compete for cocaine or for Peace. Only about 5% of the cocaine produced in Colombia passes through there.

We know that Trump bombed a factory in Maracaibo; we fear that they mix coca paste there to make cocaine and take advantage of the location on Lake Maracaibo.

It is simply the ELN. The ELN is allowing, through its racketeering and its mental dogma, the invasion of Venezuela.

The Colombian army must immediately take a ‘Gringo edge’ in Catatumbo and replace crops. Today, due to the expansion of coca leaf cultivation in Latin America, faced with a demand that is growing only too much in Europe, the price of cocaine has collapsed. There are huge warehouses in Africa storing dozens of tons of cocaine, and the price of coca leaf in Colombia has collapsed; cannabis and illicit gold are now more profitable than cocaine.

It is time for substitution; the state must take advantage of it.

They have made Trump believe that I am a front man for Maduro, hence his recent references to me. I thought U.S. intelligence was more professional, or that, if it is, the president of the U.S. does not listen to it and surrounds himself with greedy far-right figures who are not seeking the truth.

A few days after the New Year, I will recount the particularities of my relationship with Chávez’s progressive movement and my frustrations about what remained of his government after his death.

I do not know whether Maduro has illegitimately taken wealth from Venezuela; in our country there is no evidence of drug trafficking on his part. The generals we proved were negotiating cocaine were in sedition with the support of the Colombian government, seeking a coup in Caracas.

But by now professional investigators in the U.S. should have verified that neither I nor my close relatives have assets outside the country or in Colombia, other than my home, for which I am still in debt.

Even The New York Times has already published a journalistic article saying that they have found no evidence against me to keep me on the OFAC list.

What a mess by the U.S. government. My last phone conversation with Maduro was about how to jointly strike the ELN on the border. I am a free man and always will be, and I do not care about greed.”

Gustavo Petro (@petrogustavo) on 𝕏 🖇