The president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, demanded this Saturday that his US counterpart, Donald Trump, “tell the people of Colombia where Alberto (sic) Coral is,” a leftist activist detained last Tuesday in the state of Arizona.

“Tell us if we are truly companions in the fight against drug trafficking, or if they only see us as an inferior people to be used, beaten, economically and politically tortured in the US. If so, Beto Coral’s father, a captain in the Colombian police, lost his life for nothing,” Petro stated on his X account.

Activist Franklin Humberto ‘Beto’ Coral is the son of a Colombian police officer who was killed in an operation against Pablo Escobar and, according to his family, his current whereabouts are unknown after being detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, despite having a pending asylum application and having lived in that country since 2015.

“Colombia has sacrificed 15,000 police officers who died young to prevent US society from consuming cocaine and has sacrificed more than 200,000 murdered Colombians and a million children of Latin America,” Petro added in his defense of Coral.

Last Wednesday, Petro ordered the Foreign Ministry to intervene with the United States government to secure the activist’s release and said that his detention is “a political persecution incentivized by the US candidate, a citizen of the United States.”

In his comment, Petro alluded to the far-right presidential candidate Abelardo de la Espriella, who also has US citizenship and who in recent weeks has publicly denounced dozens of people he accuses of buying votes for the left ahead of this Sunday’s elections, with the intention of having Washington revoke their visas.

Coral has expressed criticism of Trump and De la Espriella’s candidacy on his social media, and in the elections on March 8, he was a leftist candidate for a seat in the House of Representatives for the constituency of Colombians abroad.

According to Petro today, Coral “is now a political prisoner in the US solely due to the political support that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave to the defender of genocidal narco-paramilitaries of the Colombian people, Abelardo de la Espriella, who suggested his capture,” and added that the activist “has been detained and beaten by the US government, separating him from his family.”

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