COLOMBIAN President Gustavo Petro has pointed the finger at Ecuador for arming insurgents behind a deadly bus bombing last month in Cauca.

The April 26 bombing that killed 20 has been blamed on splinter groups from the former Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc), which laid down its arms in 2017.

Officials had tied the violence to drug-trafficking, but Mr Petro suggested on Sunday there was also a political rationale, with “powerful Ecuadorian politicians tied to drug-trafficking” having an interest in destabilising Colombia, both to undermine its left-led government and to divert attention from their links to the cocaine trade.

Ecuador, Mr Petro said, was now a regional cocaine-exporting hub. The country’s homicide rate has soared since the days of its socialist president Rafael Correa, who left office in 2017 when it had the lowest murder rate in Latin America.

From 2020-23, homicides rose fivefold — from 1,400 killings to 8,200 — an increase widely blamed on drug-trafficking gangs.

Ecuador’s President Daniel Noboa, a corporate princeling and Donald Trump ally, has responded with states of emergency and deployment of the military to policing roles. Though Ecuadorian voters rejected his proposal to let the United States establish military bases in the country last November, the US military has since deployed to Ecuador, allegedly to combat drug-trafficking.

The Trump administration has accused Mr Petro himself of involvement in the illegal drug trade, the same allegation it levels at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, who it kidnapped on January 3. It has supplied evidence for neither claim.