BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — Colombia’s largest remaining rebel group called for a “national accord” to overcome political conflicts in the South American nation, as it faces the prospect of attacks from the governments of both Colombia and the United States.
In a statement published Monday on its X account, the National Liberation Army, or ELN, said that after elections in Colombia this year, the group would like to work with the nation’s new government to design agreements aimed at defeating poverty, protecting ecosystems and “overcoming” the drug trade in rural areas.
The statement follows reports that the governments of Colombia and the United States are looking for ways to conduct joint operations against the ELN, a group that Colombian President Gustavo Petro has described as “drug traffickers dressed up as guerrilla fighters.”
Pressure on ELN has increased since early this month when the United States captured Venezuela's former President Nicolás Maduro in a pre-dawn raid and flew him to the U.S. to face drug trafficking charges. The indictment against Maduro in the New York case accuses Maduro of providing protection to the ELN in Venezuelan territory and working with the group to traffic cocaine.
Since the raid, officials in Colombia are taking steps to weaken the group's position in Venezuela.
Last week Colombian Interior Minister Armando Benedetti said that President Petro and U.S. President Donald Trump discussed the ELN and its role in drug trafficking during a phone call that decreased tensions between the two leaders.
According to Benedetti, the presidents discussed possible joint operations against the ELN. In an interview with Colombian radio station Blu, Bendetti said that “the issue (with the ELN) is that they need to be attacked when they retreat” into camps in Venezuela.
Petro said in a message posted Monday on X that the ELN has to give up drug trafficking and recruiting minors if it wants peace talks to resume. The president also called on the rebel group to to stop using camps in Venezuela, or face “joint actions” that also involve Venezuela's government.
The Colombian government suspended peace talks with the ELN last year, after the group staged an offensive in the northeastern Catatumbo region that forced more than 50,000 people to flee their homes.
The ELN was founded in the 1960s by students and union leaders inspired by the Cuban revolution. It currently has around 5,000 fighters operating in Colombia and Venezuela.
Pedestrians cross the border from Venezuela to Villa del Rosario, Colombia, Monday, Jan. 5, 2026, two days after U.S. forces captured and removed Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. (AP Photo/Santiago Saldarriaga)
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump has arrived at a delicate moment as he weighs whether to order a U.S. military response against the Iranian government as it continues a violent crackdown on protests that have left nearly 600 dead and led to the arrests of thousands across the country.
The U.S. president has repeatedly threatened Tehran with military action if his administration found the Islamic Republic was using deadly force against antigovernment protesters. It's a red line that Trump has said he believes Iran is “starting to cross” and has left him and his national security team weighing “very strong options.”
But the U.S. military — which Trump has warned Tehran is “locked and loaded” — appears, at least for the moment, to have been placed on standby mode as Trump ponders next steps, saying that Iranian officials want to have talks with the White House.
“What you’re hearing publicly from the Iranian regime is quite different from the messages the administration is receiving privately, and I think the president has an interest in exploring those messages,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Monday. “However, with that said, the president has shown he’s unafraid to use military options if and when he deems necessary, and nobody knows that better than Iran.”
Hours later, Trump announced on social media that he would slap 25% tariffs on countries doing business with Tehran “effective immediately” — his first action aimed at penalizing Iran for the protest crackdown, and his latest example of using tariffs as a tool to force friends and foes on the global stage to bend to his will.
China, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Brazil and Russia are among economies that do business with Tehran. The White House declined to offer further comment or details about the president’s tariff announcement.
The White House has offered scant details on Iran's outreach for talks, but Leavitt confirmed that the president's special envoy Steve Witkoff will be a key player engaging Tehran.
Meanwhile, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and key White House National Security Council officials began meeting Friday to develop a “suite of options,” from a diplomatic approach to military strikes, to present to Trump in the coming days, according to a U.S. official familiar with the internal administration deliberations. The official was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Trump told reporters Sunday evening that a “meeting is being set up” with Iranian officials but cautioned that “we may have to act because of what’s happening before the meeting.”
“We’re watching the situation very carefully,” Trump said.
Demonstrations in Iran continue, but analysts say it remains unclear just how long protesters will remain on the street.
An internet blackout imposed by Tehran makes it hard for protesters to understand just how widespread the demonstrations have become, said Vali Nasr, a State Department adviser during the early part of the Obama administration, and now professor of international affairs and Middle East studies at Johns Hopkins University.
“It makes it very difficult for news from one city or pictures from one city to incense or motivate action in another city,” Nasr said. “The protests are leaderless, they're organization-less. They are actually genuine eruptions of popular anger. And without leadership and direction and organization, such protests, not just in Iran, everywhere in the world — it’s very difficult for them to sustain themselves.”
Meanwhile, Trump is dealing with a series of other foreign policy emergencies around the globe.
It's been just over a week since the U.S. military launched a successful raid to arrest Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro and remove him from power. The U.S. continues to mass an unusually large number of troops in the Caribbean Sea.
Trump is also focused on trying to get Israel and Hamas onto the second phase of a peace deal in Gaza and broker an agreement between Russia and Ukraine to end the nearly four-year war in Eastern Europe.
But advocates urging Trump to take strong action against Iran say this moment offers an opportunity to further diminish the theocratic government that's ruled the country since the Islamic revolution in 1979.
The demonstrations are the biggest Iran has seen in years — protests spurred by the collapse of Iranian currency that have morphed into a larger test of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's repressive rule.
Iran, through the country’s parliamentary speaker, has warned that the U.S. military and Israel would be “legitimate targets” if Washington uses force to protect demonstrators.
Some of Trump's hawkish allies in Washington are calling on the president not to miss the opportunity to act decisively against a vulnerable Iranian government that they argue is reeling after last summer's 12-day war with Israel and battered by U.S. strikes in June on key Iranian nuclear sites.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said on social media Monday that the moment offers Trump the chance to show that he's serious about enforcing red lines. Graham alluded to former Democratic President Barack Obama in 2012 setting a red line on the use of chemical weapons by Syria's Bashar Assad against his own people — only not to follow through with U.S. military action after the then-Syrian leader crossed that line the following year.
“It is not enough to say we stand with the people of Iran,” Graham said. “The only right answer here is that we act decisively to protect protesters in the street — and that we’re not Obama — proving to them we will not tolerate their slaughter without action.”
Former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich, another close Trump ally, said the “goal of every Western leader should be to destroy the Iranian dictatorship at this moment of its vulnerability.”
“In a few weeks either the dictatorship will be gone or the Iranian people will have been defeated and suppressed and a campaign to find the ringleaders and kill them will have begun,” Gingrich said in an X post. “There is no middle ground.”
Indeed, Iranian authorities have managed to snuff out rounds of mass protests before, including the “Green Movement” following the disputed election in 2009 and the “woman, life, freedom” protests that broke out after 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in custody of the state’s morality police in 2022.
Trump and his national security team have already begun reviewing options for potential military action and he is expected to continue talks with his team this week.
Behnam Ben Taleblu, senior director of the Iran program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a hawkish Washington think tank, said “there is a fast-diminishing value to official statements by the president promising to hold the regime accountable, but then staying on the sidelines.”
Trump, Taleblu noted, has shown a desire to maintain “maximum flexibility rooted in unpredictability” as he deals with adversaries.
“But flexibility should not bleed into a policy of locking in or bailing out an anti-American regime which is on the ropes at home and has a bounty on the president’s head abroad,” he added.
Activists take part in a rally supporting protesters in Iran at Lafayette Park, across from the White House, in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt speaks with reporters at the White House, Monday, Jan. 12, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
President Donald Trump waves after arriving on Air Force One from Florida, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026, at Joint Base Andrews, Md. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
