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.”
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.
According to Petro, authorities in the border region have found “27 charred bodies” of people who would have died in air strikes that appear to have been carried out by foreign armed forces.
The bombings along the Colombia-Ecuador border do not appear to be the work of armed groups—they don’t have aircraft—nor of the Colombian security forces. I did not give that order.
President Gustavo Petro
Authorities released images of the bomb that was allegedly found in Jardines de Sucumbios, a hamlet on the Ecuadorean border.
In a response, Noboa told the his Colombian counterpart on X that “your claims are false. We are acting on our territory, not yours.”
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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