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.