Petro denies having asked Trump to lift the sanctions

Washington – Colombian President Gustavo Petro denied this Tuesday having asked US President Donald Trump to remove him from the list of the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), known as ‘Clinton List’, which entails financial sanctions for the president.

“I didn’t ask that. You know what my life was like. For a good part of my youth I didn’t need banks or checkbooks,” Petro declared at a press conference, in which he did specify that he told Trump that one cannot “act under blackmail”.

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He affirmed that neither of them spoke about personal matters: “He didn’t tell me about his business, nor did I tell him about mine, because I don’t have any,” he affirmed. Regarding his inclusion on the ‘Clinton List,’ which the Treasury Department justified due to alleged links to drug trafficking, Petro stated that those accusations are unfounded. “If there were legal evidence, I wouldn’t be here speaking,” he pointed out about his presence in Washington. The leader opined that he was actually sanctioned for the words he said in September during a rally in New York, where he urged American soldiers to disobey Trump’s orders regarding the Gaza Strip. He also stated that OFAC “does not function as an instrument against drug trafficking” and that it is a “symbolic” instrument because the large capitals of drug lords are not actually pursued. Trump and Petro met for two hours at the White House in the first meeting between the two, after a year of strong disagreements and insults between them. Both the American and the Colombian expressed their satisfaction with the outcome of the meeting. In the center was the issue of drug trafficking, as Washington maintains that cocaine production has skyrocketed under the Petro government, while the latter defends that its crop substitution policy has been successful.