Since Donald Trump’s administration included him (without evidence) in the list of people sanctioned for alleged links to drug trafficking, the president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, has slept a few nights in the Casa de Nariño, that government building in the heart of Bogotá that he insists on describing as cold and ugly. Over the next two weeks, he embarked on a tour of the Middle East that took him to Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Qatar. Then, on Thursday, he arrived in Belém, in the Amazon, to visit Brazilian Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva at the opening of the United Nations climate summit, COP30. And he will receive it on Sunday in the Caribbean city of Santa Marta, already a guest of the summit between the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Celac) and the European Union that his Government has been preparing for months.
“The fact that Europe is led to invest in more weapons, based on its gross domestic product (GDP), is a mistake for Europe if it pays attention, it is not a defense and security issue, it is not Russia that is the enemy, it is the climate crisis that is the enemy,” Petro said on Thursday, speaking at the meeting of heads of state ahead of the climate summit in Belém. He was referring to the commitment of members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to increase their defense spending. His anti-establishment speech, as usual, was highly critical of fossil fuels, to which he usually blames humanity’s future extinction – although he did not raise those flags when he was in Arabia, one of the world’s largest oil producers. Also very critical of Trump himself.
The two ideologically opposed presidents, unpredictable and tempted to take positions through social networks, clashed relentlessly in the 10 months in which they coincided in power, despite Washington being Bogota’s main commercial and military partner. The tension has only increased in recent months, in which Petro has suffered the feared decertification in the fight against drugs, lost his visa – after having called on American soldiers to disobey Trump from the streets of New York – and is now the target of sanctions by the US Treasury. This, for the moment, has not stopped the Colombian’s busy calendar of international commitments, who has tried to project leadership beyond his borders in the three long years in which he has been in office.
Bogota, a traditional ally of Washington, was also the hardest hit on the continent by cuts to the USAID cooperation agency. In January, the Colombian economy hit the precipice when Trump threatened it with his tariff club after Petro returned two planes with handcuffed Colombian deportees. That first crisis – North America’s first with any country in the world – was resolved in less than 24 hours thanks to the mediation of diplomats, former presidents and businessmen, but it showed Colombia the need to diversify relations. Since before the latest friction with Trump, Petro, who holds the presidency pro tempore of Celac, insisted on the need for Latin America to establish a “horizontal dialogue” with other regions of the world, “free from authoritarianism and imperialism”. In the midst of a tariff war, in May Colombia even joined the Belt and Road Initiative, the official name of the New Silk Road, China’s big bet to increase its global influence.
Colombia is not isolated, underlines Mauricio Jaramillo Jassir, deputy minister of multilateral affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “You can agree or disagree, but it is a government that has a global ambition. Petro, from the first time he went to the United Nations in September 2022, spoke of an alternative approach against drugs, the environment and Palestine”, he underlines. New embassies were opened in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Senegal, while that of Ghana was reopened. “We are talking about decisions made before decertification,” he defends. “This creates the optical illusion that you’re responding to Trump, but it actually doesn’t have much to do with that,” he says. In March next year, Cali will host the first summit between Celac and the African Union. The Santa Marta meeting confirms this intense diplomatic activity.
Petro has made more than 70 trips abroad, for a total of more than 250 days outside the country. The opposition has even presented a legislative project to place limits on these presidential trips. In Doha, Petro met with the Emir of Qatar, Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, whom he asked to act as a mediator to “ease the conflict” with Trump. “We are the most successful government in seizing cocaine in the world,” he defended. In Riyadh he met Mohamed bin Salman, Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, and in Cairo he attended the inauguration of the Grand Egyptian Museum, as well as a meeting with President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi.
At the end of the tour, he gave a long interview to the Al Jazeera television network about Gaza, in which he made it clear that, although US sanctions have made his journey more difficult and his visa has been revoked, he intends to return to New York to speak before the United Nations Security Council. There are reasons to doubt his optimism. Even if the government does not recognize it, due to the sanctions it has lost room for diplomatic maneuver, underlines internationalist Sandra Borda. “You cannot build a strategic, selective, thoughtful and principled foreign policy if you are cornered,” warns the professor at the University of Los Andes, in Bogotá.
In this context, the Celac-EU summit presents itself as an opportunity for Petro to insist that the region close ranks in the face of the challenge posed by Trump’s foreign policy. After confirming his presence, Lula underlined that he hopes to participate with the intention of “defending the countries of Latin America.” He added that, in his opinion, the meeting “will only make sense” if “the issue of American warships in the seas of Latin America” is discussed. Petro, who has been very vocal in his criticism of this military deployment in the Caribbean, was quick to respond: “I thank President Lula for having decided that, in this very difficult moment for Latin America and the Caribbean, we should meet in Santa Marta with Europe. It is time for unity.”
