Tag: colombia

Conservative Colombian Presidential Candidate Uribe Shot In The Head In Bogota Event

Conservative Colombian senator Miguel Uribe Turbay was shot in the head on Saturday in an apparent assassination attempt. There was no immediate confirmation from the authorities on the status of his condition.

The 39-year-old senator is a member of the opposition conservative Democratic Center party, founded by former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe. The two men are not related.

According to a party statement condemning the attack, the senator was hosting a campaign event in a public park in the Fontibon neighborhood in the capital on Saturday when “armed subjects shot him in the back.”

The party described the attack as serious, but did not disclose further details on his health.

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Colombian woman sentenced in Florida to 20 years in prison for kidnapping, drugging two US soldiers in Bogotá

A Colombian national has been sentenced to over 20 years in federal prison for her role in the drugging, kidnapping, and robbery of two US military service members in Bogotá, Colombia.

Kenny Julieth Uribe Chiran, 35, was sentenced in the Southern District of Florida to 262 months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release. She was also ordered to pay $24,115 in restitution. In March 2025, she pleaded guilty to conspiracy to kidnap internationally protected persons.

According to the US Justice Department, the incident occurred on the evening of March 5, 2020. The two US soldiers, on temporary duty in Bogotá, had visited a local pub in an entertainment district after watching a soccer match. There, Uribe Chiran and a co-conspirator approached them and secretly drugged their drinks with benzodiazepines. Once incapacitated, the soldiers were kidnapped, robbed of valuables and financial information, and later abandoned in separate locations across the city.

“Uribe Chiran and her co-defendants mercilessly preyed on US soldiers when they drugged their drinks, stole their valuables, and left them incapacitated on the street,” said Matthew R. Galeotti, Head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. “Kidnapping and assaulting two US military service members is deplorable, and the Criminal Division will continue to prioritize protecting our service members through these prosecutions.”

US Attorney Hayden P. O’Byrne for the Southern District of Florida echoed that sentiment: “Kidnappings and assaults against US service members will not be tolerated. To those who would dare commit such reprehensible acts against America’s heroes, know this: We will identify you; we will find you; and we will prosecute you as aggressively as the law permits.”

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Colombia seizes nearly 49 tonnes of China-bound smartphone mineral

Colombian police said Wednesday they had seized nearly 49 tonnes of tin and coltan, a mineral used in smartphones, that had been illicitly extracted by leftist rebels and readied for shipment to China.

They valued the seizure, one of the biggest of illegally mined coltan in Colombia in years, at US$1.2 million.

The police said the minerals, which are mined together, were extracted by dissident members of the now-defunct rebel Farc army in the jungle near the Venezuelan border.

The shipment seized in the city of Villavicencio came from illegal mines in the remote eastern departments of Guainia and Vichada.

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CIA Analysis of HVCA 2592 Suggesting Hitler Survived World War II and Lived in Colombia

A previously released classified document from 1954 is making the rounds again on the internet after its release years ago. The document claims Adolf Hitler survived World War II and was living in South America.

The document was the CIA’s response to the allegations that Hitler was living in Colombia and had been for several years.

Here is the full document Analysis of Document HVCA 2592 Suggesting Hitler Survived World War II.

In this document, the CIA responds to this explosive claim: The Acting Chief of the Station, Caracas, released a document where he alleges that a trusted friend delivered information that a former SS trooper stated to him casually that Adolf Hitler was still alive and living in Colombia.

The CIA document goes over the details of the claim that Hitler was still alive. Allegedly, an SS Officer traveled from Caracas to Colombia to see Hitler once per month.

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Colombian President Calls On Lawmakers To Legalize Marijuana To Combat Cartel Violence In The Illicit Market

The president of Colombia is calling on lawmakers to legalize marijuana in the country, arguing that prohibition “only brings violence” from cartels in the illicit market. And he’s also pushing other nations to legalize coca leaves for “for purposes other than cocaine.”

On Sunday, President Gustavo Petro warned in a social media post of the “multinationalization of the cocaine mafias,” claiming that there are more cartels today than before high-profile trafficker Pablo Escobar was caught and imprisoned.

“The empowerment of mafia organizations shows the failure of prohibition and the absence of alternative measures to simple prohibition,” the president said, according to a translation.

“My government will maintain full cooperation with all governments in the matter of confiscating cocaine,” he added. “And it has focused and will focus its action on large shipments and on high-ranking cocaine and money laundering bosses worldwide.”

Petro then said he’s asking the Colombian Congress to “legalize marijuana and remove violence from this crop.”

“The prohibition of marijuana in Colombia only brings violence,” he said.

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Colombian president calls for cocaine to be legalised worldwide and says it’s ‘no worse than whisky’

Colombia’s socialist president has said cocaine ‘is no worse than whisky’ and is only illegal because it comes from Latin America – as he called for the illicit drug to be legalised around the world. 

Colombia is the world’s biggest cocaine producer and exporter, mainly to the United States and Europe, and has spent decades fighting against drug trafficking. 

President Gustavo Petro’s remarks came during a live broadcast of a government meeting on Tuesday, in which he also claimed that cocaine is being scapegoated by American politicians. 

He stated that the illicit drug ‘is illegal because it is made in Latin America, not because it is worse than whisky.’

‘Scientists have analyzed this. Cocaine is no worse than whisky,’ he added, suggesting that the global cocaine industry could be ‘easily dismantled’ if the drug were legalized worldwide.

‘If you want peace, you have to dismantle the business (of drug trafficking),’ he said.

‘It could easily be dismantled if they legalize cocaine in the world. It would be sold like wine.’

Petro also pointed out that fentanyl ‘is killing Americans and it is not made in Colombia’, referring to the opioid responsible for around 75,000 deaths in the United States a year, according to official data.

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Cocaine Outpaces Oil As Colombia’s Most Valuable Export

In a shocking development, Colombia’s cocaine production, for the 10th year straight, soared to a new record high. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimates that the year’s annual output grew 52% year over year to a startling 2,664 metric tons, the largest amount ever produced. Despite the government in the capital Bogota, with U.S. backing, committing substantial resources to disrupt what is now an economically crucial illicit industry in rural Colombia coca cultivation and cocaine manufacturing keeps spiraling higher. The booming cocaine trade drives heightened insecurity and corruption which are damaging key economic sectors, notably the fiscally vital petroleum industry with oil Colombia’s most valuable export.

Since the 1990s, except for a brief period from 2011 to 2012, Colombia has consistently been the world’s leading cultivator of the coca plant. The bushy shrub’s alkaloid-rich leaves, long chewed by Indigenous South Americans to boost energy and ward off altitude sickness, are the vital precursor needed to manufacture the popular recreational narcotic cocaine hydrochloride which is widely consumed in developed nations around the world. The volume of cocaine produced is spiraling ever higher despite Colombia, since the 1980s, waging a multi-billion-dollar U.S.-backed war on drugs, 

This conflict not only failed to stem the flow of cocaine but prolonged Colombia’s civil war and cost hundreds of thousands of Colombians (Spanish), mostly civilians, their lives. There are multiple reasons for this, but the key is the weakness of the Colombian state which is exacerbated by Bogota being caught in a protracted country-wide multiparty asymmetric conflict rooted in inequality, Cold War politics and foreign interference. Colombia’s widespread poverty and lawlessness create favorable conditions for the growth of illicit economies, such as smuggling, thereby allowing the cocaine trade to take root.

While the cocaine business has existed since the early 1970s in Colombia, it was the formation of the Medellin and Cali Cartels toward the end of that decade that put the Andean country firmly on the global map as a leading cocaine exporter. The vast profits cocaine generates caught the attention of a multitude of illegal armed groups across Latin America including those waging a vicious decades-long civil war in Colombia. This led to a significant escalation in the conflict among cartels, leftist guerrillas, and right-wing paramilitaries, all vying for control of the lucrative billion-dollar illicit industry. These events sparked a vicious cycle of escalating violence, which fueled further lawlessness thereby perpetuating the conditions that allowed the cocaine trade to thrive.

Surprisingly, large-scale cultivation of the coca plant did not occur in Colombia when the Medellin Cartel was at the peak of its power during the 1980s. Estimates put the amount of coca being cultivated during the mid-1980s at a mere 32,000 acres or 13,000 hectares, roughly a twentieth of what it is today. Both the Medellin and Cali Cartels, at the time the world’s largest suppliers of the drug, relied upon coca paste imported from Bolivia and Peru to manufacture the cocaine they were shipping to the U.S. and Europe. This changed as other illegal armed groups, particularly rightwing paramilitary death squads and the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC – Spanish initials) entered the fray. 

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Hilarious: Leftist Doom Posts About Trump’s Columbia Spat Aged Like Rancid Milk

On Sunday, the socialist President of Colombia Gustavo Petro refused to let deportation planes departing the US land in his country and return hundreds of Columbian illegals that were rounded up by the Trump administration.

Petro accused Trump of treating “Colombian migrants as criminals,” and announced that he was refusing “entry of American planes carrying Colombian migrants” until the US has established “a protocol for the dignified treatment of migrants.”

Trump immediately threatened tariffs and other sanctions.

The State Department outlined what would happen.

Within minutes, the Columbian President completely capitulated and backed down, agreeing to all Trump’s terms on taking back illegals.

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Without job opportunities in their homeland, Colombians are recruited by Kiev

NATO’s proxy war against Russia through Ukraine has shown significant changes in various aspects, particularly regarding the participation of foreign mercenaries. While, at the start of the war, the flow of fighters was predominantly composed of individuals from Europe and the United States, a notable shift occurred throughout 2024, with a considerable increase in mercenaries from Latin America, especially Colombia. The driving factor behind this growing presence of Latin American fighters is not ideological, but rather economic, with many of these soldiers seeking a way to survive financially abroad, considering the extreme poverty in their home countries.

Colombia, one of the nations most affected by economic inequality in Latin America, serves as an example to understand this reality. With a large portion of the population living below the poverty line, many Colombians see themselves with few viable alternatives to improve their financial situation. For many Colombians, military service appears to be one of the few legal options that guarantees some level of financial stability, albeit modest. However, with scarce job opportunities and a struggling economy that fails to offer appealing alternatives, the chance to participate in the war in Ukraine, where mercenaries’ payments can be much higher, becomes attractive to many ex-soldiers who were previously trained in the Colombian armed forces.

The situation in Ukraine, however, does not turn out to be a “simple battlefield” for these mercenaries, as it might have seemed initially. When the first foreign fighters arrived, particularly Europeans and Americans, many saw the war as an opportunity to test their skills or even to partake in an “adventure.” However, as the conflict intensified, it became clear that the reality of the Ukrainian battlefield was far more brutal than many had imagined. Modern warfare, with its predominant use of heavy artillery, airstrikes, and large-scale exhausting confrontations, is an environment unfamiliar to soldiers who, like many Colombians – as well as Brazilians and other Latin soldier – were used to urban combat and guerrilla warfare, where the use of light weapons at short distances is common.

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Colombia’s Diverse Environments Grow Marijuana With ‘Uncommon Terpenes’ That Can Have ‘Unique Therapeutic Benefits,’ Study Shows

New research on Colombian-grown cannabis reveals “significant phytochemical diversity” in the plants, uncovering what authors say are “four distinct chemotypes based on cannabinoid profile” as well as plants that are rich in uncommon terpenes.

The findings “underscore Colombia’s capacity to pioneer global C. sativa production,” the study says, “particularly in South America with new emerging markets.”

The diversity in compounds produced by Colombian cannabis plants could benefit not only growers—for example, by increasing resistance to pests and other pathogens—but also the development of unique medical marijuana products, says the study, published in the journal Phytochemical Analysis.

One factor behind the observed biological diversity could be Colombia’s varied environmental zones, the research says. The country is home to snow-covered volcanoes, tropical beaches, deserts, grasslands, rainforest and more. That variety also contributes to Colombia’s other agricultural industries, such as coffee.

Authors of the new study, from universities in Columbia, Germany and the United States, sought out licensed cultivators of medical marijuana across Colombia. Ultimately, growers donated 156 samples from 17 total cultivation sites, representing seven provinces and five different regions.

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