The United States ambassador returned to Colombia as part of bilateral attempts to overcome a crisis caused by an alleged plot to out President Gustavo Petro.
In a post on social media platform X, acting US ambassador John McNamara said that he hoped that the countries’ governments can “revert the current negative tendency in the bilateral relation.”
Following exhaustive consults in Washington, I arrived in Medellin with the persistent concerns of my government about the rhetoric and actions of the highest levels of the Colombian government that put at risk the historical, close and mutually beneficial relation of our two countries.
Acting ambassador John McNamara
A day before, Colombia’s ambassador Daniel Garcia-Peña released a video from Washington DC in which he reiterated that “United States has no participation in a coup d’état or an attempt to destabilize the country.”
This apparently required clarification after Spanish newspaper El Pais published a recording in which former Foreign Minister Alvaro Leyva said that he met with US Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart in an attempt to gather international support to “get rid of” President Gustavo Petro.
Diaz Balart, as well as House Representatives Carlos Gimenez and Maria Elvira Salazar, had been replicating Leyva’s claims that Petro would be unfit to govern because of a drug addiction on social media.
The president has been denouncing Leyva’s apparent plot since May and has repeatedly said that he doesn’t believe that the US Government and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio were involved in the plot.
Petro’s coalition in Congress asked the Ethics Committee of the US House of Representatives to investigate whether or not Diaz-Balart, Gimenez and Salazar were unduly involved in the Leyva plot, which has also implicated far-right journalist Vicky Davila and Vice-President Francia Marquez.
The report by EL Pais did not suggest that any of the people implicated in the scandal knowingly supported the former foreign minister’s expressed ambition to overthrow the president.
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