Ouch…
The Guardian
A prominent Colombian politician and former minister has accused the country’s president, Gustavo Petro, of being a drug addict who allegedly went awol during an official visit to France.
In a damning letter to the South American leader, the former foreign minister Álvaro Leyva painted a dire picture of his one-time boss and ally, later publishing the text on his official X account.
When he joined Petro’s cabinet, shortly after his historic 2022 election, Leyva recalled having high hopes for his administration believing Colombia’s first leftwing president could become a “regional leader and global hope”.
However, Leyva said he had subsequently witnessed scenes that had caused him “unease and bewilderment”, citing the president’s supposedly poor punctuality, incoherent statements and the pointless trips he allegedly made.
Most sensationally, the ex-minister claimed he had witnessed unspecified “embarrassing moments” involving Petro such as when – during a 2023 trip to France – Colombia’s president allegedly “disappeared” for two days.
“It was in Paris that I was able to confirm that you had a drug addiction problem … Your recovery, sadly, has not taken place,” wrote Leyva, who was once close to Colombia’s leftist leader despite being of the right and served under him for nearly two years.
Petro, who has denied such claims in the past, hit back at his former ally on social media, although he stopped short of denying the accusation. Writing on X, where he is known for his lengthy and sometimes late-night posts, Petro criticized the press and said he had better things to do than spend time with his foreign minister while visiting the French capital.
“Isn’t Paris full of parks, museums, bookstores, more interesting than the letter’s writer, to spend two days in? Almost everything in Paris is more interesting. Don’t I have daughters and granddaughters in Paris who are far more interesting than the writer?” Petro wrote.
Leyva’s letter sparked a political firestorm in Colombia, with newspapers stamping his claims across their homepages.
Writing in El Tiempo, the journalist Juan Sebastián Lombo Delgado, said that never before in recent Colombian history had a key ex-member of the government publicly questioned “the faculties” of his former boss.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/23/colombian-president-petro-drug-use-awol
