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European leaders are pulling out of a summit with Latin American and Caribbean states, shortly after Donald Trump imposed sanctions and authorised military action against its Colombian host.

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and French President Emmanuel Macron will no longer attend the gathering next week in Colombia, according to officials briefed on the matter. The cancellations come after the US president accused his Colombian counterpart of being an “illegal drug dealer” and authorised US military strikes on alleged drug trafficking boats in the region.

The EU-Celac summit is scheduled to take place on November 9 and 10 in the city of Santa Marta. It is the fourth iteration of the summit in 12 years and was designed to bring together 60 leaders from Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean. But the event is now set to be very poorly attended amid concern among officials about Trump’s stance towards Colombia and neighbouring Venezuela.

“The effect of [what is happening in] the Caribbean is very complicated,” said one high-level Latin American official due to attend the summit. “The Celac meeting is suffering last-minute cancellations.”

Trump has ordered the biggest US naval build-up in the Caribbean since the Panama invasion of 1989 to crack down on drug trafficking and to put pressure on Venezuela’s authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro.

He announced sanctions against Colombian President Gustavo Petro last month, after months of rising tension between the US and Colombia over illegal drug production. Petro has denied claims by the US Treasury cited as justification for the measure, but his presidential plane was denied fuel because of the sanctions during a refuelling stop in Cabo Verde last week on a trip to Saudi Arabia.

Petro hinted that the US was trying to sabotage the summit, posting on X on Monday night that “forces alien to peace in America have wanted the Celac/European summit to fail. And, of course, the new anti-democratic fossil [fuel] geopolitics is trying to stop the peoples who want freedom and democracy from meeting.”

EU officials are deeply wary of upsetting the US president for fear of unravelling a shaky trade deal struck this summer to avoid a transatlantic tariff war, and rely on US weapons and military intelligence to supply Ukraine as it defends itself against Russia’s invasion.

“In light of the current European political agenda and the low participation of other heads of state and government, president von der Leyen is not attending the summit,” a commission spokesperson said.

A German official gave a similar reason for Merz’s decision not to attend either. The Élysée confirmed that Macron would not be going, but did not explain why.

The bloc’s chief diplomat, Kaja Kallas, had been asked to deputise and von der Leyen “remains in any case fully committed to the strengthening of the EU-Celac relations”, the commission spokesperson added.

EU Council president António Costa will travel to Colombia and co-chair the summit alongside Petro, his office confirmed on Tuesday. Costa’s role as representative of the EU’s 27 member states is seen by some officials as an attempt to mask the low attendance of individual leaders.

“We are analysing the scenarios, but there is no reason that the summit would be in any way at risk of taking place,” Mauricio Jaramillo, Colombia’s deputy foreign minister for multilateral affairs, told the Financial Times. “The summit is about much more than these key figures, and it is practically normal that this sort of thing [leaders cancelling] happens.”

Jaramillo added that the cancellations had “nothing to do with the United States” and are the result of “scheduling issues”. “It is important to be clear that Colombia is not isolated,” he said.

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Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez will attend the summit. Sánchez, who shared a stage with Petro and other leftwing Latin American leaders at an event in New York in September, is already at odds with Trump over multiple issues, including defence spending and China.

The summit’s location in Santa Marta, on Colombia’s northern coast, is in the vicinity of where US military strikes have hit alleged boats used in the illegal drug trade in recent months. Petro told the UN General Assembly in September that Trump should face “criminal proceedings” over the strikes.

The government of Brazil, which will receive national leaders in the Amazonian city of Belém this week before the start of the UN’s COP30 climate conference, said President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was not due to attend the event in Colombia and will send foreign minister Mauro Vieira instead.

The European summit woes come as the Dominican Republic on Monday announced it was cancelling next month’s Summit of the Americas, a high-profile meeting of Latin American leaders with the US and Canada, in a move that was supported by the Trump administration.

Regional diplomats said sharp divisions among Latin American leaders over Trump’s policies towards Venezuela and drug trafficking meant that attendance at the December summit was set to be very sparse. Petro and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum had already said they would not attend.

Additional reporting by Joe Daniels in Bogotá, Michael Pooler in São Paulo, Adrienne Klasa in Paris and Barney Jopson in Barcelona