Petro rejects Noboa's accusation linking him to the Ecuadorian drug trafficker Fito

Bogotá.- The President of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, rejected this Saturday the accusation made by his Ecuadorian counterpart, Daniel Noboa, who links him to the Ecuadorian drug trafficker José Adolfo Macías Villamar, alias Fito, in a new episode of the deteriorated relationship between both countries. "Nothing, I don't know Fito or his friends. I have only gone to Ecuador to attend the inauguration of its presidents, and we have captured many bandits born in that country that we have handed over," Petro wrote on his X account. The president reacted this way to statements by Noboa in an interview with the Colombian magazine Semana, in which he stated that Petro "met with members of the Citizen Revolution, and some of those members have links to alias Fito," although he said he could not confirm a direct meeting with that criminal leader.

Recapture of Fito in 2025

Fito is the leader of the Ecuadorian criminal gang Los Choneros, who escaped from a prison in Guayaquil in early January 2024, an event that unleashed a wave of violence in the country and led Noboa to declare war on drug trafficking groups. Following his recapture in June 2025, he was extradited to the United States on July 20th and became the first major Ecuadorian drug trafficker tried in that country, in a New York court. We recommend reading: Petro also lashed out at his Ecuadorian counterpart and Colombian political sectors and stated that "if Noboa gets what happened to (US President, Donald) Trump, they let our Colombian extreme right, which is murderous and drug-trafficking, fill their heads with lies." The president assured that there is an alleged strategy against him based on unsubstantiated accusations and stated that "the recordings of the Ecuadorian authorities are clear in the order they have received, according to them, from the State Department (of the U.S.), to get bandits to accuse me." Petro added that he asked Tump to mediate with Noboa during the meeting they held at the White House on February 3, but that the matter was delegated to the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio.