Colombian president ‘respectfully’ urges US to avoid interference in domestic affairs

ISTANBUL

Colombian President Gustavo Petro “respectfully” urged the US on Friday not to interfere in his country’s domestic affairs, after American envoy Mike Waltz accused Bogota at a UN Security Council meeting of “undermining progress in achieving sustained peace.”

“The Security Council does not oversee our peace policy. It is sovereign,” Petro wrote on the US social media company X.

The Security Council, by Colombia’s unilateral declaration, is mandated only to oversee the peace process with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), “which we are fulfilling,” he said.

The UN Verification Mission in Colombia is a special political mission established in 2016 by the Security Council to verify the implementation of the Final Peace Agreement and to assist Colombia in its commitment to ending the conflict and building peace.

The South American country has seen a sharp increase in political and criminal violence in recent months at the hands of the dissidents from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) Marxist-Leninist rebel group and the National Liberation Army (ELN) leftist guerrilla insurgent group.

“President Petro’s policies on security and peace – both in Colombia and around the world – are frankly irresponsible,” Waltz told the Council on Friday.

“The mistaken position of the United States on drug trafficking, human trafficking, and now the peace process with the FARC—which seeks to change our position on the genocide in Gaza—is not accepted by our government,” said Petro.

He said those who commit genocide in the Gaza Strip “must be tried as the Nazi genocidaires were tried in Nuremberg.”