Colombia's outgoing President Gustavo President tore into his US counterpart Donald Trump on Thursday for supporting a hard-right candidate to succeed him, saying Washington was endorsing "drug traffickers" with "genocidal" roots.
The famously outspoken Petro was reacting to Trump's full-throated endorsement of tough-talking lawyer Abelardo de la Espriella over a leftist senator in Colombia's June 21 presidential runoff.
De la Espriella, 47, made a fortune representing drug-trafficking paramilitaries, fraudsters and soccer stars.
He has accused Petro of being too soft on cocaine-smuggling left-wing guerrillas and vowed to crack down hard.
"Their (US) allies in Colombia come from the narco-paramilitary regime; they are genocidal and drug traffickers," Colombia's first leftist president told AFP in an interview at the presidential palace.
Both Petro and Cepeda accuse state-linked paramilitaries of having committed a "genocide" of leftist leaders at the height of the country's conflict in the 1980s and 1990s.
Cepeda's father, a communist senator, was among more than 5,700 leftist political activists that were murdered during the worst years of the conflict between the state, left-wing guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries.
Trump has sought to sway the outcome of several elections in Latin America over by backing right-wingers who talk tough on crime and migration against leftists he dismisses as "communists."
