Colombia’s Petro accuses Ecuador of bombing near border

twitterwhatsappcopylinkgoogleAdd Al Jazeera on GoogleinfoAir Force personnel destroy an airstrip they suspect to be in use by illicit aircrafts, in Milagro, Ecuador, Monday, March 16, 2026 [Cesar Munoz/AP Photo]By Alfie PannellPublished On 17 Mar 202617 Mar 2026Bogota, Colombia – Colombian President Gustavo Petro has said that 27 charred bodies were discovered on his country’s joint border with Ecuador, just one day after suggesting the Ecuadorean military may have bombed Colombian territory.

“The bombings along the Colombia-Ecuador border do not appear to be the work of armed groups—they don’t have aircraft—nor of the Colombian security forces. I did not give that order,” wrote Petro in a post on X on Tuesday morning.

The accusation comes amid a US-backed Ecuadorean military campaign against armed groups in the region launched earlier this month; Ecuador’s President Daniel Noboa maintained that all strikes have occurred within his country’s borders.

The dispute began during a cabinet meeting on Monday night, where Petro speculated about the origins of a bomb which he said was “dropped from an aeroplane” near Colombia’s southern border with Ecuador.

“We’re going to thoroughly investigate the circumstances – it happened very close to the border with Ecuador – which somewhat confirms my suspicion, but we need to investigate thoroughly: they’re bombing us from Ecuador, and it’s not the armed groups,” said the president.

Later on Tuesday, Colombia’s Ministry of National Defence issued a statement saying security forces and experts had been deployed to the area “to assess the condition of this explosive device in order to determine its origin and proceed with its destruction”.

Noboa dismissed Petro’s accusations on Tuesday morning, writing on X: “President Petro, ⁠your declarations are false, we ⁠are acting in ⁠our territory, not yours.”

The exact details of the attack are yet to be established, according to Elizabeth Dickinson, deputy Latin America director at the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank, “It’s very unclear if this came from Ecuador, what happened, who exactly was hit.”

But the alleged bombing comes just weeks after the United States Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) announced it had launched joint operations with the Ecuadorean military to combat drug trafficking in the South American nation.

In early March, Ecuador’s armed forces bombed a camp belonging to the Comandos de la Frontera (Border Commandos), a Colombian armed group active on both sides of the countries’ shared border. The operation was carried out in Ecuador with the help of US intelligence, according to Quito.

In February, Noboa imposed a 30 percent tariff on Colombia, which he described as a “security fee”. Bogota responded with reciprocal tariffs, and the dispute has since escalated to a mutual 50 percent import levy.

Noboa is under mounting pressure to tackle organised crime, with Ecuador recording the highest homicide rate in Latin America last year.

He has attempted to shift blame onto Bogota, which he accuses of failing to tackle insecurity on the two countries’ joint border, a key illegal gold mining hub and cocaine trafficking corridor.

Dickinson explained that Noboa hopes to pressure Petro into adopting a more militaristic stance against armed groups along their shared border.

But, she noted, “This bilateral crisis between the two sides does a lot more harm than good in solving this problem, because what you really need to confront a transnational threat is a transnational response.”