Colombian President Gustavo Petro warned this Friday that the country “survived the genocide” into the hands of criminal groups and that these mafia organizations “have political power” and they control territories with “private armies”.

“One of the fundamental characteristics of the Colombian mafia is that it wields political power. It’s not the peasants who grow coca leaves, They are businessmen, they are senators. They enter through the Government Palace, as Pedro through his house; they have and had power,” he warned during a speech at an event organized by the New Economy Forum at the end of his first official visit to Spain.

The President of Colombia pointed out that “when a criminal group comes to power, genocide is unleashed” and noted that “well-known Pablo Escobar pales before the power of the current mafia organizations, who now have not only farms or haciendas, but also territories.

In this sense, he argued that they were difficult to distinguish and argued that “they have enormous transnational power”insisting that “if we want Colombia to separate itself from the drug trade and violence, the land must be given to the peasants.”

So he blamed lack of agrarian reform “like in Spain or Europe” drug trafficking and violence in colombia, which became “a major exporter of cocaine for several decades”. “We have a very unequal land ownership structure, so this is one of the most unequal countries because it is a kind of 21st century feudalism,” he said.

“The peasantry was brought into force, millions of peasants were displaced. We see 20 million hectares of fertile land without producing a single product. Since there was no equitable land tenure, like what could be in European countries, (…) if we want Colombia to disassociate itself from the drug trade and therefore dissociate itself from violence, we must give fertile land to the peasant, and this will have to made by the Colombian state,” he explained.

Petro emphasized that this is one of the “obsessions” of the current government, and recalled that the state collapsed in 60 years. “Almost all governments that try to do this find themselves in the grip of violence, which I call endless violence,” he added.

“Need to give the peasantry a decent life, which is the true name for peace and the denarcotization of the country,” he insisted, before pointing out the complex “transformation” to solve the problem.

Colombia and Venezuela

Regarding relations between Colombia and Venezuela, Petro accused the United States of trying to reproduce the “NATO-Putin” conflict between the two countriesa clear allusion to the current Russian invasion of Ukraine.

So, he specified that when Donald Trump was president of the United States, “he was told that could invade Venezuela via Colombia because they had a military alliance with the Russians.” “They wanted to drag us into NATO,” he said, before emphasizing that they were trying to replicate the conflict between the Allies and Russia.