Colombia’s president has drawn Washington’s ire after accusing the US of killing Colombian citizens during a recent boat strike in the Caribbean Sea.
“A new theatre of war has opened up: the Caribbean,” Gustavo Petro wrote on his official X account on Wednesday night.
The US has launched at least four deadly aerial attacks on alleged drug trafficking boats crossing the waterway since early September, when 11 people were killed in the first strike.
The South American country’s leftwing leader claimed there were “indications” that the most recently destroyed boat was Colombian “and had Colombians onboard”.
“I hope their families come forwards to report this,” added Petro, a fierce critic of Donald Trump, without offering further details or evidence.
Since the US began its strikes in the Caribbean at least 21 people have reportedly lost their lives. On Friday, the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, said four “narco-terrorists” were killed in international waters “just off the coast of Venezuela” as they transported “substantial amounts of [US-bound] narcotics”.
However, the names of those killed on the supposed “narco-boats” have not been released and Trump officials have failed to provide any proof that the victims were involved in smuggling drugs to the US.
The White House pushed back against Petro’s claims, demanding he publicly retract “his baseless and reprehensible statement” about the boat attack. But two US officials, who were not authorised to discuss the matter publicly, told the New York Times that Colombians were on at least one of the boats recently destroyed by the US.
Petro urged the White House to release the names of those killed by US strikes “so I can see if my information is unfounded”.
Washington claims its strikes – which are part of a major military buildup in the Caribbean Sea – are part of a large-scale crackdown on Venezuelan narco groups it accuses of flooding the US with cocaine.
However, the decision to deploy warships and thousands of marines off Venezuela’s Caribbean coast has left many observers many wondering if the operation is actually a pretext to depose Venezuela’s authoritarian president, Nicolás Maduro.
“The deployment is vastly disproportionate to any real counter-narcotics mission. So this really looks, walks and talks like a regime change preparation,” Juan González, the White House’s former top Latin America official, told CNN this week.
González, who served under Joe Biden, said that by some estimates “roughly 10% of naval assets” had been sent to the region.
On Wednesday, Maduro, who Trump failed to topple during his first term, warned that his troops were preparing for a possible attempt at regime change. “If the gringos attack, we will respond.”
Venezuela’s defense minister, Vladimir Padrino López, said he was braced for a variety of scenarios including drone attacks, an air campaign or acts of sabotage or targeted assassinations carried out by US special forces.
Writing on Wednesday, Petro claimed “the war” playing out in the Caribbean Sea was not about drug smuggling but oil, a commodity of which Venezuela boasts the world’s largest reserves. “The world must stop this,” Petro added. “This aggression is aimed at the whole of Latin America and the Caribbean.”
On Thursday, Grenada’s ministry of foreign affairs confirmed it had received a request from the US for the “temporary installation of radar equipment and associated technical personnel”. The confirmation followed days of speculation by local media that the US was going to ask the country to host military assets to help with their operations in the southern Caribbean.
While some Caribbean nations, such as Trinidad and Tobago, have welcomed the US’s military presence in the region, others have described it as a threat to peace and security.
The Venezuela-backed Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America trade bloc, of which Grenada is a member, had condemned the US deployment of warships as a “flagrant violation” of international law. In its statement, Grenada said it was carefully reviewing the request and would only make a decision after “technical and legal assessments”.
