Colombia’s Petro Calls for Mass Mobilization to Reject Trump’s Threats

Written on 01/06/2026
Josep Freixes
Colombian President Gustavo Petro called for a popular mobilization tomorrow, Wednesday, following new threats from President Trump. Credit: Andrea Puentes / Presidency of Colombia.

The president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, issued a call for popular mobilization for tomorrow, Wednesday, Jan. 7, in an appeal aimed at channeling public indignation over what he describes as direct threats to national sovereignty by the government of the United States and, in particular, its president, Donald Trump.

The gathering is scheduled for the afternoon hours in all public squares across the country, with special emphasis on Bogota’s Plaza de Bolivar, which will once again become the nerve center of pro-government rallies, and where Petro has announced that he will “address the people of Bogota” and take an active part in the demonstration.

The motivation for this call comes after Trump’s repeated threats of a possible military intervention against Petro and against Colombia, similar to what happened on Saturday in Caracas, after once again accusing the Colombian president of “having cocaine production factories.”

Colombia’s Petro calls for mass mobilization to reject Trump’s threats

Petro’s call represents another step in the escalation of tensions that have existed since last year in the already deteriorated bilateral relations between Colombia and the United States, now at their worst point in decades.

While Trump insists — so far without providing any evidence — on linking Petro, a Latin American president not aligned with Washington’s policies, to drug trafficking, Petro has once again expressed his rejection of foreign interference and of what he considers “a threat to national sovereignty.”

The president used his social media accounts to invite citizens to raise the national flag in their homes and to fill the country’s squares in defense of sovereignty, a concept he has repeatedly emphasized in recent days as the core of his political message.

“Raise the flag of Colombia in your home now. On Wednesday, we’ll see each other in all the squares of Colombia, at 4 p.m. Now it’s time to defend national sovereignty,” Petro wrote yesterday on his X social media account.

Beyond Petro’s traditional rhetoric, it is worth recalling that the Colombian president is one of the regional leaders who, along with Brazil’s Lula da Silva, has been most critical of the White House’s anti-drug policy. The criticism intensified following U.S. attacks on alleged drug-running speedboats in the Caribbean and the Pacific — operations that have caused more than a hundred deaths — as well as what happened on Saturday in Venezuela, which ended with Maduro’s capture, a development that Bogota describes as a violation of international law, in line with what the United Nations stated yesterday.

Trump’s renewed threats against Petro

On the same day as these events, during President Trump’s press conference, the president once again singled out Gustavo Petro as a possible next target, accusing him of alleged links to drug trafficking, as had already happened with Nicolas Maduro.

Hours later, Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One that, like Venezuela, “Colombia is also very sick,” and, referring to Petro, said the country is “governed by a sick man who likes to make cocaine and sell it to the United States, and that is something he is not going to be doing for much longer.”

When asked by the press whether those statements meant there could be a U.S. operation in Colombia, Trump replied: “That sounds good to me.”

In response to those comments on Sunday, Petro threatened yesterday to “take up arms again if necessary,” as in his years with the M-19 guerrilla movement, to defend his country’s sovereignty from the U.S. president’s “illegitimate threat.”

Tomorrow’s rally seeks to project an image of unity and a firm response to the renewed threats from the United States, all within an electoral context that will shape Colombia’s immediate future.