Petro claims the ELN was the target of US attack in Venezuela

Colombian President Gustavo Petro has stated on social media that a recent attack claimed by Donald Trump’s administration in Venezuela hit a factory located near the city of Maracaibo, in the northwestern part of the country. “We know that Trump bombed a factory in Maracaibo. We fear that they mix coca paste there to make cocaine and take advantage of its location on the Maracaibo Sea,” Petro said via X. He added that those responsible for producing cocaine in the area are the ELN guerrilla group, with whom his government tried to negotiate a peace agreement, but those talks are now frozen. “It’s simply the ELN. With its rattling and mental dogma, the ELN is allowing Venezuela to be invaded,” added the head of state.

Petro did not name the company involved, but there is a factory in Maracaibo called Primazol, which imports raw materials for industry and has issued several statements since December 24 denying what many citizens are convinced was a bombing that night. What happened, they say, was the outbreak of a fire at 12 a.m. “in one of the raw materials warehouses,” caused by an electrical problem in the wiring at the site. Firefighters arrived in the early morning and brought the situation under control.

More than for the factory in Maracaibo, Petro’s message is aimed at the two guerrilla groups fighting in Catatumbo, an area on the border with Venezuela and one of Colombia’s largest cocaine production areas. Petro points out that some of that cocaine is shipped to the Caribbean Sea via Venezuela. “The ELN in Catatumbo and the (FARC dissidents) 33rd Front must decide whether they are going to compete for cocaine or for peace. Only 5% of the cocaine produced in Colombia passes through there,” the president said on his X account. The 33rd Front is still in peace negotiations with the government, but it is also engaged in a bloody battle in Catatumbo against the ELN, which has currently displaced hundreds of families. The ELN, for its part, has consolidated its power in the state of Zulia, where Maracaibo is located.

“In Zulia, there are dozens of clandestine airstrips used by light aircraft to transport cocaine shipments to Central America and Mexico. Access to, and in some cases control of, these airstrips has allowed the ELN to profit from every stage of the cocaine supply chain that begins in Catatumbo and ends with drug-laden flights leaving Venezuela,” says a recent Insight Crime report on the expansion of guerrilla groups in Venezuelan territory.

“The authorities have discovered large-scale coca crops in territories controlled by the ELN [in Zulia], as well as cocaine laboratories, which have proliferated in the same municipalities. Zulia also offers impunity to the ELN. The guerrilla group maintains close ties with elements of the Venezuelan state.”

The Colombian president also states in his lengthy social media message that the boats attacked with missiles by the United States in the Caribbean Sea, in which more than 100 people have already died, “were not carrying cocaine but cannabis.” The cocaine that leaves those coasts, Petro asserts, “is being transported by submarine and container. Cannabis is being attacked illegitimately.”

The Colombian head of state ends his post with a message to the U.S. government, which in the last six months has revoked his visa and added him to a Treasury list accusing him, without evidence, of being an ally of drug traffickers. “Trump has been led to believe that I am Maduro’s front man, hence his recent references to me. I thought that U.S. intelligence was more professional, or that if it is, the U.S. president does not listen to it and surrounds himself with greedy far-right figures who are not seeking the truth,” he wrote. He then announces that he is not very close to the Venezuelan leader. “My last telephone conversation with Maduro was about how to jointly strike against the ELN on the border,” he states, distancing himself from the head of state in Caracas, but above all maintaining the message against the guerrilla group that trafficks drugs in both countries.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition