Colombia can’t give Trump the cocaine crackdown he wants
When US president Donald Trump hurled abuse at Colombia’s president Gustavo Petro last month, branding him a ‘sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States’, it was strikingly audacious. Trump leant into bombastic provocation: there is no evidence to suggest Petro himself makes cocaine. And yet, Trump’s claim didn’t come as a shock – the two leaders have spent the past year locked in a volley of barbs with one another. Petro, Colombia’s first left-wing leader, likes to fire back with ideological, often sermonising lectures on imperialism and US hypocrisy. But tangled up in the rancorous exchanges – many of them about drugs – is
