By Cynthia Michelle Aranguren Hernández Colombia has been branded a narcotics pariah by the Trump administration, receiving its first 'failing to cooperate' designation since 1997 as record cocaine production and deteriorating US-Colombia relations under leftist President Gustavo Petro reach a breaking point.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro has halted all future arms purchases from the United States in response to Washington's decertification of his country as a counter-narcotics ally.

The dilapidated, tin-roofed schoolhouse sits perched amid fields of coca, the base ingredient in cocaine, in the small southwestern Colombian town of San Juan de Micay.

In San Juan de Micay, Colombia, despite promises of development and peace, the presence of leftist rebels and lack of government investment continue to plague the region. President Gustavo Petro's efforts to replace coca cultivation with legal crops face hurdles,

Less than a decade later, that peace is gone. Land mines line many of the muddy byways. Residents clutch unofficial ID cards mandated by armed groups to distinguish friends from enemies. “There are three options now,” a young community leader told me recently. “You do what the armed group says, you leave, or they kill you.”

WASHINGTON – Colombian President Gustavo Petro declared during his inaugural address last August that the time has come for a new approach in the international war on drugs, which he argued has failed – “and failed resoundingly.” The leftist leader ...