The Colombian city of Santa Marta, a Caribbean resort with scorching sun, white sand beaches and full of tourists, is hosting the fourth summit of the leaders of the European Union (EU) and the 33 countries of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) this Sunday. The world has changed since the last meeting, held in Brussels in 2023 after eight years, and proof of this is that the list of those absent is larger than that of those present. Donald Trump’s coming to power exploded the consensus that has ordered the world for the last 80 years. The Santa Marta summit was intended to be the ideal setting to open the doors to a new order, but this is unlikely to happen. If two years ago there were a dozen Latin American presidents and a good portion of European presidents present at the meeting, this weekend’s appeal barely reaches a dozen out of a total of 60.
The Government of Colombia has been silently denouncing for days the pressure from the White House to reduce the list of participants to a minimum. Trump’s shadow goes far beyond a simple diplomatic game against CELAC, born in Mexico in 2011, the era of the rise of progressive Latin American governments, as an OAS without the United States. Santa Marta is located about a hundred kilometers from the area chosen by Washington to unleash the war declared against the boats accused of transporting drugs to the United States from the coasts of Venezuela and Colombia. 18 ships have already been blown up under American fire in the last two months, with a death toll of 69.
As for Latin America, the only important figures in Santa Marta will be the host, Gustavo Petro, and the Brazilian Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who, to the despair of the Colombian Foreign Ministry, only confirmed his presence late in the week. The regional progressive axis is very weakened. Chilean Gabriel Boric is a week away from the vote that will determine the choice of his successor, and countries like Bolivia and Argentina are now in the hands of the right. Mexican Claudia Sheinbaum declined the invitation. Not even all Mercosur presidents except Lula will be present, although the signing of the agreement between the bloc and the EU is scheduled for December 20, as both parties eagerly await. Left-footed player Yamandú Orsi withdrew at the last minute due to logistical problems and Paraguayan Santiago Peña will not be in the match. The Venezuela-Nicaragua-Cuba axis will barely send second-line personalities and Peru is going through an accelerated change of government.
The losses should come as no surprise. CELAC brings together nations of all sizes and interests, from small English-speaking island nations in the Caribbean to a giant like Brazil. Furthermore, the cohesion between governments as different as that of Nicolás Maduro and that of Javier Milei makes it difficult to reach consensus in a community without its own institutional framework such as that of the EU. It is a scenario very prone to external pressures.
On the EU side, meanwhile, the Prime Minister, António Costa, will travel to Santa Marta. At the last minute, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, gave up, even though she had included it in her agenda and was in Brazil to attend the climate summit organized by Lula. The Spaniard Pedro Sánchez will also be there, who had quite an odyssey to get there.
Sánchez traveled from Belém, but had to take a military plane to travel from Barranquilla to Santa Marta because the officer could not land at the local airport due to the size of the runway, which no doubt discouraged other presidents, reports Carlos E. Cué of Santa Marta. Sánchez traveled to demonstrate his commitment to the relationship between the EU and CELAC and try not to lose influence in a continent increasingly controlled by Trump and governments’ turn to the far right. The Spanish leader is putting pressure on the EU, especially France’s Emmanuel Macron, with Lula’s help, to sign the EU-Mercosur agreement now. But he does not want to clash directly with Trump, and at Friday’s press conference in Brazil he avoided criticizing his military threats against Venezuela. All his gestures and his alliance with Lula are in line with the proposal of the left’s alternative to the imperial world outlined by the president of the United States.
In this sense, the Summit’s agenda does not reserve any big surprises: defense of multilateralism, trade and investments at a time when the world continues in the grip of the tariff war launched by Trump. We will also talk about ecological and digital transition, the joint fight against organized crime, corruption, drug trafficking and human trafficking. The Brazilian Lula has made it clear that he also intends to put the drug traffickers crisis on the table. The meeting, he said in a press conference during the COP30 held in Belém, “only makes sense if we discuss the issue of American warships in the seas of Latin America”.
The same spirit moves Petro, who receives the summit at a very particular moment in his foreign relations. Colombia has been an unconditional ally of the United States for decades, a major beneficiary of its military aid and support for its failed war on drugs. Petro has now marked a clear distance from Trump. Although the split was maintained in almost personal terms – the American said that the Colombian was a “criminal” who “produces a lot of drugs”, and his government withdrew his visa and included him in the so-called Clinton List, a list of people sanctioned by the Treasury – the change is broader.
Since before Trump came to power, the first left-wing president of the newly formed Colombia has broadened diplomatic horizons, with the opening of embassies in African countries, a greater commitment to South-South cooperation or a recent tour of Arab nations. Another example is the announcement last May of Colombia’s membership in China’s New Silk Road investment program.
In 2023, after the Brussels summit, it was already known that Colombia would hold the presidency of the organization and host it in 2025. What was not known was that Trump would be re-elected. Nor was it clear which city would host the heads of state, a function that Bogota, its capital, usually carries out in the South American country; Cartagena de Indias, the colonial tourist city on the shores of the Caribbean Sea; or Medellín. Petro preferred Santa Marta, which this year commemorates the 500th anniversary of the founding of the first Spanish colonizers and sought to position itself as a symbol of the meeting of Indo-American, Afro-Iberian and Iberian cultures. Santa Marta is also the place where the liberator Simón Bolívar died in 1830. With fewer transport links than other cities, today it hosts not only the summit of heads of state and chancellors, but also parallel events on cultural, economic and social issues that have revolutionized the locality.
