Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro said Monday that evidence suggests Ecuador’s armed forces are carrying out cross-border air strikes.
During a televised cabinet meeting, Petro said that “a bomb has been found” that was apparently “dropped from a plane.”
“They are bombing us from Ecuador and it’s not the armed groups,” said the president.
Petro said that he asked his US counterpart Donald Trump to call his Ecuadorean counterpart, Daniel Noboa, “because we don’t want to go to war.”
I am proud to have saved Colombia from the threat of missiles, which are falling all over the world right now. This is an age of missiles, a death sentence for humanity, one threat after another. We managed to save Colombia. They were already falling on our neighbor. But we shouldn’t have to be bombarded with smaller weapons either.
President Gustavo Petro
The president’s claim comes more than a month after local media reported that at least 11 people were killed in three attacks on cocaine factories in the southwestern Nariño province in the last week of January.
Members of the Coordinadora Bolivariana guerrilla group, which is taking part in a peace process in the region, told Revista Raya that they suspected that US and Ecuadorean airplanes bombed the cocaine factories.
The armed forced wouldn’t confirm or deny the allegation at the time.
The US military has been supporting the Ecuadorean armed forces in at least one air strike earlier this month on the Ecuadorean side of the border.
This attack targeted an alleged training facility of the Border Comandos, a Colombian drug trafficking organization that was formed by demobilized paramilitaries and later enforced with demobilized guerrillas.
Ties between the Noboa and Petro administrations have been strained because of the governments’ opposing view on how to deal with drug trafficking, which has soared violence in Ecuador.
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