Colombian President Responds to Sudan TV Report

Colombian President Gustavo Petro issued an urgent call to criminalize mercenary work in his country, describing it as a modern form of human trafficking, where “men are turned into commodities to be killed.”

The Colombian president’s remarks came immediately after Sudanese National Television announced that the armed forces had carried out an airstrike on the occupied Nyala airport, killing approximately 40 Colombian mercenaries aboard an Emirati military aircraft.

Although he did not mention the UAE by name, Petro explained that he had tasked his country’s embassy in Egypt—due to the lack of diplomatic representation in Sudan—with following up on the incident and coordinating the return of the bodies.

The Colombian president described the participation of mercenaries from his country as “turning our youth into commodities to be sold for death,” emphasizing that they were participating in a war against Sudan, “from which no one had harmed them,” making them targets for these operations. He added that those coordinating mercenary operations from within his country “betrayed their oath to Simón Bolívar.”

Despite the seriousness of the incident, Petro refrained from directly naming the UAE, choosing instead to address it as an internal problem. This reflects the extent of the influence the UAE now wields in Colombia, especially after the signing of the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) in 2022, the UAE’s first agreement of its kind with a Latin American country.

This agreement expands the UAE’s access to Colombia’s infrastructure, energy, and agricultural sectors, raising the political and economic cost of any public confrontation with it. Within this unequal context, Petro chose to frame the crisis as a domestic legal and moral failure and pushed for a bill to criminalize mercenary activity.