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GUSTAVO PETRO ISN’T AFRAID OF DONALD TRUMP  
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Cruz Bonlarron Martínez
September 30, 2025
Jacobin
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_ 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
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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
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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
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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
targe
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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of neighboring Venezuela that President Petro made an appearance
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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.

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Cruz Bonlarron Martínez is an independent writer and was a Fulbright
Fellow in Colombia from 2021–2022. His writing on politics, human
rights, and culture in Latin America and the Latin American diaspora
has appeared in various US and international publications.

* Columbia; Gustavo Petro; United Nations;
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