Colombian President Gustavo Petro survives a serious assassination attempt

Colombian President Gustavo Petro said on Tuesday he had survived an assassination attempt hour earlier, after warnings he had been receiving for months about an alleged drug smuggling plot targeting him.

On Monday night, Petro’s helicopter was unable to land at its destination on the Caribbean coast due to fears that unnamed people would have shot at it.

“We went to sea for four hours and it got to a place we didn’t intend to go, to escape being killed,” Petro said at a government meeting broadcast live on Tuesday evening.

Petro met with Donald Trump at the White House last week for nearly two hours, in a meeting described as cordial, just weeks after the US president threatened to take military action against the South American country and accused its president of pumping cocaine into the United States.

Trump said after the meeting that his relationship with Petro hadn’t been the best of relationships, adding: “We had a very good meeting… And I found it wonderful,” Trump said.

The two presidents discussed cooperation on counternarcotic and a number of other issues.

The meeting came just weeks after Trump threatened Petro with a possible US military intervention in Colombia, as happened in Venezuela.

Colombia is the world’s largest producer of cocaine, and the United States is its largest consumer.

In a gesture of goodwill, last week the Colombian president deported a drug lord to the United States.

For decades, Colombia has been Washington’s closest partner in Latin America, with billions of dollars pouring into Bogota to bolster the country’s anti-narcotics military and intelligence services.

But under Petro, coca production and cocaine exports rose dramatically.