{"id":389097,"date":"2026-01-05T12:31:17","date_gmt":"2026-01-05T12:31:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/389097\/"},"modified":"2026-01-05T12:31:17","modified_gmt":"2026-01-05T12:31:17","slug":"trump-threatens-colombias-petro-says-cuba-looks-ready-to-fall-donald-trump-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/389097\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump threatens Colombia\u2019s Petro, says Cuba looks \u2018ready to fall\u2019 | Donald Trump News"},"content":{"rendered":"

United States President Donald Trump has threatened military action against his Colombian counterpart, Gustavo Petro, following Washington\u2019s abduction of Venezuela\u2019s leader<\/a>, and said he believed the government in Cuba, too, was likely to fall soon.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s comments on Sunday came amid a growing outcry over the brazen abduction<\/a> of Nicolas Maduro, with Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Uruguay and Spain condemning the US action as a \u201cdangerous precedent for peace and regional security\u201d.<\/p>\n

Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of list<\/p>\n

Trump told reporters on board Air Force One that Venezuela and Colombia were \u201cvery sick\u201d and that the government in Bogota was run by \u201ca sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd he\u2019s not going to be doing it very long. Let me tell you,\u201d Trump said, referring to Petro.<\/p>\n

When asked if he meant a US operation against Colombia, Trump said, \u201cSounds good to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

The remarks prompted a sharp rebuke from Petro, who told Trump to \u201cstop slandering\u201d him while also calling on Latin American countries to unite or risk being \u201ctreated as a servant and slave\u201d.<\/p>\n

In a series of lengthy posts on X, Petro noted that \u201cthe US is the first country in the world to bomb a South American capital in all of human history\u201d. But he said revenge was not the answer.<\/p>\n

Instead,\u00a0Latin America must unite, Petro said, and become a region \u201cwith the capacity to understand, trade, and join together with the whole world\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe do not look only to the north, but in all directions,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Warnings to Venezuela, Mexico, Cuba<\/p>\n

US forces seized Maduro in Caracas early on Saturday in what Washington described as a law enforcement operation to bring him to trial on \u201cnarcoterrorism\u201d charges.<\/p>\n

Maduro denies the allegations, and critics say the US\u2019s toppling of the Venezuelan leader was aimed at taking control of the country\u2019s vast oil reserves.<\/p>\n

Speaking to reporters on Air Force One, Trump insisted that the US remains \u201cin charge\u201d of Venezuela, even though the country\u2019s Supreme Court has appointed Vice President Delcy Rodriguez as interim leader.<\/p>\n

He also reiterated threats to send the US military back to Venezuela if it \u201cdoesn\u2019t behave\u201d.<\/p>\n

Trump said a lot of Cubans were killed<\/a> in the US raid on Caracas, adding that an American military intervention in Cuba was unnecessary because the island appears ready to fall on its own.<\/p>\n

\u201cCuba is ready to fall,\u201d he said. \u201cCuba now has no income. They got all of their income from Venezuela, from the Venezuelan oil. They\u2019re not getting any of it. Cuba literally is ready to fall.\u201d<\/p>\n

The US and Cuba have had strained relations since Fidel Castro overthrew a Washington-backed government in Havana in 1959 and established a socialist state allied with the former Soviet Union.<\/p>\n

Trump went on to warn Mexico, saying the country \u201chas to get their act together because they\u2019re [drugs] pouring through Mexico and we\u2019re going to have to do something\u201d.<\/p>\n

He described Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum as a \u201cterrific person\u201d and said he has offered to send US troops to Mexico every time he spoke to her.<\/p>\n

The Mexican government is capable of addressing the issue, \u201cbut unfortunately, the cartels are very strong in Mexico\u201d, he said.<\/p>\n

Trump has made no secret of his ambitions to expand the US presence in the Western Hemisphere and revive the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine, which claims that Latin America falls under Washington\u2019s sphere of influence.<\/p>\n

Trump has called his 21st-century version the \u201cDon-roe Doctrine\u201d.<\/p>\n

His comments on Sunday were not his first warnings to Latin American nations.<\/p>\n

In the immediate aftermath of Maduro\u2019s abduction, Trump said Petro has to \u201cwatch his a**\u201d and that the political situation in Cuba was \u201csomething we\u2019ll end up talking about, because Cuba is a failing nation\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u2018Dangerous precedent\u2019<\/p>\n

The US attack on Venezuela meanwhile continued to draw international condemnation.<\/p>\n

The governments of Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Uruguay and Spain expressed their \u201cprofound concern\u201d in a joint statement and said they \u201cfirmly reject the military actions undertaken unilaterally in Venezuelan territory\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese actions contravene fundamental principles of international law, particularly the prohibition on the use or threat of force. They constitute an extremely dangerous precedent for peace and regional security and endanger the civilian population,\u201d they said.<\/p>\n

Analysts said it remained unclear whether Trump would act on his threats or whether he was aiming to coerce the Latin American nations into cooperating with Washington.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s very hard to predict. If you look at the way Trump operates, what he always hopes is other countries will do what he wants them to do without him having to use very much force. That these short, spectacular displays of force, like the bombing in Iran, this operation in Venezuela, will scare other countries into doing what Trump wants them to do,\u201d said David Smith, an associate professor at\u00a0the University of Sydney\u2019s US Studies Centre.<\/p>\n

Trump is \u201ctrying to pressure regime change\u201d across Latin America in other ways as well, Smith said, noting that the US president has previously sparred with Petro over deportation flights and sanctioned a Brazilian judge who oversaw the prosecution of former President Jair Bolsonaro \u2013 a Trump ally \u2013 for an attempted insurrection.<\/p>\n

Trump has also backed the right-wing government of Argentina\u2019s Javier Milei and pardoned ex-Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez of drug trafficking charges.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve seen in this first year of his administration in general a far more concerted agenda to promote right-wing governments in Latin America and to damage left-wing governments in Latin America,\u201d Smith said.<\/p>\n

Matthew Wilson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University in the US, said Cuba would be the top priority if further action occurred, given longstanding US grievances against the country.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would be more concerned if I were in Cuba than if I were in Colombia,\u201d Wilson said. \u201cBecause there\u2019s a longstanding US grievance against Cuba, and definitely a mobilised constituency of Cuban Americans who are very hostile to the regime there.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"United States President Donald Trump has threatened military action against his Colombian counterpart, Gustavo Petro, following Washington\u2019s abduction…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":389098,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3668,12,3140,3,21,19,22,20,25,1209,24,18232],"class_list":["post-389097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-cuba","tag-donald-trump","tag-latin-america","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-us-canada","tag-usa","tag-venezuela"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389097","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=389097"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389097\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/389098"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=389097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=389097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=389097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}