Gustavo Petro Isn’t Afraid of Donald Trump
Colombian president Gustavo Petro lambasted Donald Trump’s human rights abuses and Israel’s genocide at the United Nations last week. The US State Department revoked his visa in response.
Donald Trump’s attacks on Gustavo Petro are nothing new. Petro was even a target of Trump’s ire before he became president of Colombia. (Michael Nagle / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The US Department of State published a tweet on Friday night stating its plans to revoke the visa of Colombian president Gustavo Petro due to his “reckless and incendiary actions” on his visit to New York City during the United Nations General Assembly. The actions in question were accompanying Pink Floyd singer Roger Waters to a protest in solidarity with Palestine outside the UN and speaking at the rally. Petro didn’t mince words, stating that “human history has shown us across millennia that when diplomacy ends, we must pass to a different stage of struggle. What is happening in Gaza is a genocide. There’s no need to call it anything else. Its objective is to eliminate the Palestinian people.” He also called on “soldiers of the army of the United States not to point their guns at people” and to “disobey the orders of Trump, obey the orders of humanity.”
The short intervention put Petro in the same club as Colombian author and Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez, who similarly had his visa revoked in 1984 due to his support for liberation movements in Latin America. However, for an acting head of state, the action is exceedingly rare. (What are possibly the only two precedents also involve Palestine and Colombia: the cancellation of the visa of the Palestinian Authority’s Mahmoud Abbas just ahead of this year’s assembly and the revocation of Colombian president Ernesto Samper’s visa during the Clinton administration, after members of his campaign were found to have accepted contributions from the Cali Cartel). Even leaders who have vehemently opposed US imperialist foreign policy, like Hugo Chávez, Fidel Castro, and Muammar Gaddafi, never received the same treatment and were allowed to participate in the UN General Assembly and engage with supporters in the United States.
The retaliatory action weakens international law and the viability of future General Assemblies in New York, raising doubts about whether the United States is the best place to host the world’s most important diplomatic institution. Petro was not phased by the move and quickly responded with a series of tweets stating that he doesn’t care and doesn’t need a visa to travel to Ibagué, a city in Colombia where he was scheduled to speak at an event.
Trump’s Silent War on Colombia
Donald Trump’s attacks on Gustavo Petro are nothing new. Petro was even a target of Trump’s ire before he became president of Colombia. During his 2020 campaign, Trump called out Petro by name at a Florida rally, criticizing Joe Biden for receiving Petro’s endorsement, emphasizing Petro’s past as a guerrilla fighter, and referring to him as a “bad guy.” The boogeyman of Petro and the 2016 Colombian peace agreement formed fundamental parts of Trump’s outreach to Colombian voters in South Florida as well as the discourse of far-right Latino Republicans like María Elvira Salazar. Fast-forward five years, and now Trump sees Petro not just as a boogeyman but a threat to his hegemony, as Petro refuses to remain silent in the face of Trump’s bullying and his human rights violations at home and abroad.
President Petro’s unwillingness to be bullied by Trump made him a target back in January, when he refused to accept deportees in shackles and dispatched the presidential plane to return them to Colombia. Many in corporate media in Latin America labeled Petro as stubborn, but he has shown himself capable of winning concessions from Trump by leveraging Colombia’s unique geopolitical position.
In the following months, the Colombian leader embraced dialogue and in March even invited Trump’s secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem, to the Casa de Nariño, the Colombian presidential palace. In the meeting, the two expressed their profound disagreements on security issues and human rights, but they agreed to continue to cooperate on issues of importance to both countries like drug trafficking and migration. Despite what seemed like a positive meeting between the two delegations, a week later Noem attacked the Colombian government during an interview on the right-wing cable channel Newsmax. In the interview, she claimed that Petro spent much of the meeting criticizing the Trump administration and referred to cartel members as his friends. The outlandish claims were quickly refuted by the Colombian government, and Petro clarified that he brought up the role that the US embargo against Venezuela has played in the growth of the Tren de Aragua criminal organization and the need for governments to address the structural causes of crime.
At the same time, by gutting the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the Trump administration also indirectly undermined many of the initiatives that the Colombian government and civil society organizations were making to implement the 2016 peace agreement and address the root causes of violence. While USAID undeniably has roots in the United States’ imperialist foreign policy, many Global South nations had become dependent on the resources, including agencies of the Colombian government, one of the largest recipients of aid. Despite this, Petro thanked Trump for making Colombia less dependent on the United States and stated that another country’s government should not be paying the salaries of Colombian officials. The aid cuts nonetheless dealt a serious blow to efforts to end the violence that surrounds the illicit drug industry in Colombia.
The Trump administration put what might have been the nail in the coffin of diplomatic relations between the two nations when it announced its decertification of Colombia for counternarcotics cooperation at the beginning of the month, something that had not happened since the 1990s during the Proceso 8000 finance scandal around President Samper’s campaign. The decertification means that Colombia will likely receive further aid cuts. It could also lose access to loans and be subject to sanctions and visa restrictions.
The Trump administration is taking these punitive measures even as cocaine seizures and the destruction of processing facilities have increased dramatically during Petro’s presidency, often to the chagrin of decriminalization and legalization advocates. In response, Petro’s government announced it would stop buying weapons from the United States and instead manufacture them in Colombia. The Trump administration’s sanctions, however, have much to do with Petro’s vocal criticism of the United States’ assassinations of alleged drug traffickers on small boats in international waters in the Caribbean and Washington’s war on the fictional Cártel de los Soles. They also come just in time for Colombia’s elections, where the party of far-right former president and Trump ally Álvaro Uribe seeks to return to power.
The Leader We Need
It was amid months of sabotage from the Trump administration and the possibility of a disastrous US invasion of neighboring Venezuela that President Petro made an appearance at the UN General Assembly last week. In his speech, Petro showed himself ready to stand up to Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s imperialist politics, whatever the geopolitical cost of resistance.
President Petro pulled no punches, calling out the US government’s clear violation of international law in the Caribbean weeks earlier. “The youths murdered with missiles in the Caribbean were not part of the Tren de Aragua,” he stated. “Nobody knows their names, and they never will. They were Caribbeans, possibly Colombians.” He called on the UN to try those responsible for the murder, including the one who gave the order to attack — President Trump.
Petro also used his speech to highlight the Trump administration’s hypocrisy in the “war on drugs,” stating that it was in Trump’s first term, during the government of the previous Colombian president, Iván Duque, that drug trafficking skyrocketed. He reminded Trump that the real people profiting off the drug trade were his neighbors in Florida and the Latino Republicans advising him on foreign policy in Latin America, not the poor peasants in Colombia. He also expressed bluntly that the war on drugs is not meant to stop cocaine from entering the United States but to “dominate the people of the Global South.”
Petro proposed a new path for the world based on peace and the struggle against climate disaster, calling upon other leaders to move toward renewable energy. He also highlighted the importance of building lasting peace, something he said has been ignored by the UN, proposing the creation of a peacekeeping force capable of stopping the genocide in Gaza and liberating Palestinian territories from the illegal occupation. He ended his speech by saying it was time for “liberty or death,” and that “liberty is possible through the human heart, the capacity to unite, rebel, and exist.”
Much like the General Assembly speeches of Ernesto “Che” Guevara and Hugo Chávez before him, Petro’s will go down in history as a critical statement in the struggle against US imperialism. Further, the fact that shortly afterward he took to the streets together with ordinary people to demand the liberation of Palestine and an end to Trump’s authoritarian policies in the United States and abroad shows why Petro is a critical voice for the global left at this moment.
Few contemporary leaders have taken such a principled stand against Trump, no matter the consequences and despite what can sometimes feel like insurmountable odds. While his term ends next August, Petro has come to represent not only the Colombian people but a courageous voice on the political left, one seeking a new path toward collective liberation in the face of the existential threat of the authoritarian right.