This politician raises the Colombian flag on Santa Rosa, a disputed islet in Peru

For nearly twenty-four hours, everyone wondered who had taken the initiative to plant a Colombian flag on the islet of Santa Rosa, at the risk of further inflaming tempers regarding this piece of land in the middle of the Amazon River, claimed by both Bogota and Lima.

The mystery was finally solved on Tuesday, August 12, when politician Daniel Quintero posted a video on X in which he can be seen raising the tricolor flag over the disputed land. “We cannot mourn like children what we have not been able to defend as men. […] This is my flag and I raise it here to declare that this is Colombian territory,” he proclaims in the video cited by the Colombian magazine Cambio .

Former mayor of Medellín (2020-2023) and protégé of Colombian President Gustavo Petro, Quintero is an ambitious 45-year-old technocrat who hopes to represent the left in the 2026 presidential election, despite the corruption accusations that have weighed on him since he governed Medellín, recalls the Peruvian newspaper El Comercio.

It was as part of his campaign that he decided to carry out this media stunt, “at the risk of generating unnecessary controversy and aggravating the diplomatic conflict with Peru,” warns the Peruvian daily La Republica in a video . For its part, the Argentinian media Infobae published another video showing the aftermath of Quintero’s action: a boat chase by Peruvian boatmen calling him “ignorant.” The site also notes that a Colombian opposition MP has requested that he be declared persona non grata in Leticia, the Colombian city closest to the islet.

Long ignored by the general public, the controversy over Santa Rosa Island – called Chineria Island by Peru – returned to the forefront on August 7, when Gustavo Petro chose the occasion of a national celebration to criticize the “Peruvian occupation” of this piece of land – originally a simple sandbar, inhabited since the 1970s by fewer than 3,000 Peruvians.

The accusation comes as Colombia and Peru are on bad terms and both are about to enter an election year, with the left-wing government of Gustavo Petro and the right-wing government of Dina Boluarte putting their mandates on the line in 2026.

Several other incidents have occurred this week near the island. Peru claims that a Colombian fighter jet entered its airspace without authorization on August 7, Colombian police officers were pushed back on August 9 by the Peruvian navy – without incident – and Gustavo Petro denounced on August 13 the arrest of two Colombian workers who were carrying out measurements on the island of Santa Rosa, notes El País America .

For now, the two countries – which fought a brief war between 1932 and 1933 – are calling for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict. The spirit of the peace treaty signed in 1933 was “that Colombia have access to the Amazon River,” recalls El País América, which seems to be the real issue in this dispute, as the emergence of the islet blocks access to water for the Colombian city of Leticia, located just across the river.