The US wants you to know they're coming after Petro

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Hello, you're listening to a collaboration between Columbia Reports and Pirate wire services

My name is Adrian Olsman

I'm Joshua Collins, here for Pirate wire radio

Today we're going to talk about kind of a scandal that erupted after

First in New York Times and Reuters said that there were two investigations

on going in New York into precedent Gustavo Pedro

And then after that the associated press said that they had designated

Pedro as a priority target

Yes, so the AP, MIT, and I believe writers were the first to all receive leaks from presumably

with Justice Department that these investigations were ongoing

And then later on the day the AP released further information that Pedro has surfaced

in multiple investigations dating back to 2022

And then he has been designated a priority target by the DEA

Based on interviews with confidential informants

Yeah, so in a 2018 document of the DEA

It says the basic concept of priority targeting is to identify target, investigate

and disrupts or dismantle the most significant international, national, regional

and local impact on drug availability within the United States

So according to this document Pedro is a suspected criminal

A simpler way to put it is that the DEA puts that on people they suspect

might have a significant impact on the drug trade

That could be nationally or internationally

Yeah, pink pins basically

So the alleged crimes according to AP's report that the DEA has been looking into

include accusations of possible dealings with Mexico's Sinaloa cartel

As well as a scheme that his total peace plan

A picture has a plan that has not had great success

It was an idea to negotiate with a lot of the non-state armed groups here in the country

in return for their disarmament

The DEA is alleging that this total peace plan is actually designed to benefit drug traffickers

in the country

It also accuses the Colombian president of using law enforcement and security forces

to smuggle cocaine in fentanyl

Now there's a lot of problems with this that we're going to get into

Let's get into the problems

First of all, these allegations are made by confidential sources

So that's basically like in the majority of the cases when it comes to the DEA's confidential sources

They are drug traffickers that are actually paid by the DEA itself

So in there was in 2016 sort of an audit of this program

and then there it said that between October 1, 2010 and September 30, 2015

The DEA had over 18,000 active confidential sources assigned to its domestic offices

With over 9,000 of these sources receiving approximately 237 million dollars in payment for information or services they provided to the DEA

So it's true that confidential informants as opposed to confidential sources are usually on the payroll of whatever US law enforcement organizations

that they're working for, that is actually not unusual

But there is an idea that has become a problem in some court cases

where those confidential informants have a pressure to justify the money that they're receiving

That doesn't mean that they're not useful for some organizations to infiltrate some organizations

or to find information about some organizations

But it doesn't mean that they have a modem to perhaps exaggerate or pass along information that might not be confirmed to say the least

But to me that's not really the biggest issue with these accusations, although of course that is clearly a problem

Another problem is that confidential sources as opposed to confidential informants can be anyone

That could be a right-wing opponent of Petro here in Columbia calling up the DEA and saying, hey, we suspect that Petro has ties to drug organizations

which has long been a project of the opposition against Petro here in Columbia

We're going to get to that in a minute

I think even more problematic is the idea that Columbia is smuggling fentanyl to the US

Like no one has any information to support this claim

Like this is the UNODC has said nothing to this effect

Columbia is not a fentanyl producing country and any sort of a meaningful metric

And it's the same rhetoric that they've been lying about to blow up a lot of these drug boats in the Caribbean

So you have a very untrustworthy source making these accusations without proof

And putting these stories in the press as leaks

And to me that's the most problematic aspect of what's going on here

Yeah, also the scheme to leverage his total peace plan

There is indeed the part of the negotiations between the government and the illegal armed groups or the non-state armed actors

They are approved by Congress and the Constitutional Court

Like there's nothing illegal about this

It might be politically like the United States government may not agree with it

But there's nothing illegal about negotiating with illegal armed groups

In fact, the whole, if you look at what the DEA is doing with the drug traffickers on its payroll

In my opinion, it's far more controversial and morally dubious than negotiating the end of an illegal armed group

Yeah, well, legality isn't really the issue here, I don't think

I mean, it's pretty clear that the US has some political objectives with this

And interesting enough, this is repeating some rhetoric that people like Marco Rubio have said for a long time

That allowing a lot of these groups and some of them are former left-wing rebel groups here in Columbia Communists

And Rubio has long claimed that the peace process was an attempt to let these people get off scot-free

And that they were guilty of drug dealing and crimes against humanity

And now that's not entirely false

Those groups have committed grave violations of humanitarian law and are involved in drug trafficking

But it's a very ideologically driven idea to say that Petro is trying to support those groups with the total peace plan

There's a distinction there that really, to me, doesn't have much to do with legality

It's basically saying that the US doesn't approve of commies

Right? Like it's completely normal

Yeah

Or a generational justice

Like, we got to remember that back in 2018, Noticias Ono here revealed that the DEA was also trying to get dirt on the prosecutor of the war crimes tribunal, the YIP

And this was before they tried to, and actually ended up inditing a former Fargaria-Haisel-Santrieg on fabricated drug trafficking charges

Right, and just to kind of finish with these accusations about the total peace plan

I think anybody who reads Columbia reports or who is a subscriber for Pyroir

They're familiar with this idea, but I just want to restate it for people who might be new to this subject

All sides of the Colombian Civil War, which was more than half a century long committed grave human rights violations

The state, paramilitary forces that fought on the side of the state and rebel groups

Now, the idea of the peace plan was that justice will never be fully implemented on the scale that those atrocities occurred on

And the idea was to find a way out of the Civil War

And that's what the peace plan, even before Petro came into office, that was always the goal of it

Now, the progress has been imperfect, but what I'm trying to point out by my mentioning all this is that these accusations that the Colombian peace plans benefit drug traffickers

This is a very old accusation that has existed both within Columbia and the really right wing circles in the US for years, almost a decade now

Yeah, then they're still like the Sina Loa Carto, which is what surprised me the most

Because I just don't see where on earth they found an allegation that links Petro to El Chapo

Yeah

Unfortunately, the AP League did not include the documents, the DA is asserting, so it's been really hard for me to find information about this

But this is the first time that I've heard a specific allegation that Petro was somehow involved with the Mexican Sina Loa Carto

And to be frank, it's a bit difficult to believe, I'm open to new information

That is the first time I've heard that specific accusation against Petro here in Columbia

And it's kind of a shocking one, if they have evidence of that, I'd love to see it

But I haven't seen any evidence, or even those accusations before

Just because these allegations exist doesn't give any validity to them

The DA has long been criticized that they barely test the validity of the allegations made by their informants

So this makes their database of dirt very, well, kind of useless

And another dynamic that I think is clearly at work here is that

I mean, just the fact that AP writers and the New York Times all received these leaks from presumably the same sources on the same day

That's not one whistleblower trying to serve as inter-citizen capacity of getting some information of it

That's a deliberate leak from the Trump administration

Someone doesn't end up happening two months before the first round of the presidential elections

Right, a whistleblower wouldn't take that many risks

Contacting reporters, contacting multiple media companies

Because the penalties for leaking, if you get prosecuted in the US, are extremely strict, I suppose, to the word I'm looking for

So it's very clear that this is an intentional leak, the Trump administration wants these accusations to be in the press right now

And they've had their effects

All those Florida congressmen like these Miami people that have been quite dominant in the relationship between Colombia and the United States

They all speak out kind of pretending that the allegations are all true

And that we are currently being governed by a narco government in Colombia

You have the main opposition candidate, Paloma Valencia, who said that she was very concerned about the allegations

You had Abelardo de la Espreja, who said that he would make a paper or respond for this

This is really the beginning of what seems to be in a pretty undue meddling campaign

Yeah, well, I think that's pretty apparent

I mean, the US has done this in other countries they did in Honduras by endorsing the candidate

Trump's strategy in Latin America has been to negotiate principally through threats and force

And this seems pretty clearly fitting within that modus operandi

And, you know, of course, all the Colombian right-wing candidates here have responded in sort of typical cynical election shenanigans

by assuming that he's guilty before or even bothering to look at any evidence in their rhetoric

This is all just the way the elections work, right?

There's a lot of dishonest arguments going on

I mean, it's not to say that maybe some information will come to light that you and I haven't seen or know about

But, like, where it stands right now, it's pretty clear this is an attempt to influence clumbling elections

Yeah, although not the first, because I remember that the same Florida people were talking about

They chose a legit drug addiction and what not

That's right. So in April of 2025 last year

There was a former... what was he? He was like a foreign minister, excuse me.

Algo de la Levia. He was a usually part of the Petro administration, but he was fired in one of Petro's numerous cabinet shakeups

And became sort of a kind of bitter political opponent of Petro

And he surfaced these allegations that Petro was addicted to cocaine in this campaign to sort of disparage Petro

There were details of him meeting with Miami low level Republicans

Like people from the state assembly there as well as trying to get appointments with people like Rubio

Although it looks like he failed to actually get a meeting with Rubio himself

But so in the days and weeks leading up to these public accusations which he presented without proof

He was actively trying to garner support within like very right-wing US communities to sort of mount a organized campaign to back up these accusations

Nothing ever came of the accusations. There was no proof. It's a scandal that has kind of since faded at least

As far as like legal processes go. There were no charges ever filed against Petro. There was no proof

It was all based on this letter that he wrote

But there have been a lot of attempts within Colombian politics to sort of paint Petro as sympathetic to Narco dealers or tied to them

And then in the case of his son being indicted in 2023 is of course another example we can look at

As the elections approached in two months here

It's pretty clear that this is an effort to undermine another leptist who might be at odds with US policy in Colombia

This has been a problem throughout Petro's administration even before Trump came into the presidency really

That the US has been criticized a lot by Petro and by Petro's party and their history in Latin America

As well as their actions in Israel and other foreign policy decisions

The Colombian administration under Petro has been very critical of US foreign policy

And I think that it's pretty clear the White House wants someone in there who is going to be more act along the lines of Daniel Leboa in Ecuador

Who is just unconditionally behind what the US wants to do

Yeah, well we're both going to be monitoring this

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