BOGOTA, Colombia — Colombian President Gustavo Petro stirred up a decades-old border controversy with Peru on Tuesday when he accused it of fully annexing an Amazon river island that has been administered by Peru for decades, but whose legal status is in dispute.

Peru maintains it owns Santa Rosa Island based on treaties about a century old, but Colombia disputes that ownership because the island had not yet emerged from the river at the time.

In a message on X, Petro said that Peru acted “unilaterally” in June when its congress passed a law that upgraded Santa Rosa’s legal status by converting it into a district within Peru’s Loreto province.

The island faces Leticia, a Colombian city of about 60,000 people located in one of the most well-preserved swaths of the Amazon. It is used by

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