President Trump recently called Colombia’s leader, Gustavo Petro, a “sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States.”
Petro, meanwhile, has labeled Trump a murderer and compared him to Adolf Hitler.
But on Tuesday, the two leaders made nice — mostly — in a closed-door meeting at the White House that both described as productive.
Trump described the two-hour conversation, which touched on energy, Venezuela and bilateral efforts to combat drug trafficking, as “fantastic.”
Petro, in turn, called the confab “very positive” and said it had an “optimistic and constructive tone.”
He brought Trump Colombian coffee, and First Lady Melania Trump a gown crafted by Indigenous artisans.
Trump gifted him a framed portrait of the two men shaking hands, scrawled with the words: “I love Colombia.”
The meeting did not erase the considerable political differences between Trump, who believes the U.S. should dominate the Western Hemisphere, and Petro, a former left-wing guerrilla who opposed the recent U.S. operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Yet it did appeared to ease tensions between Colombia and the United States, longtime allies whose relationship soured over the last year amid public clashes between Trump and Petro.
Relations between the nations grew tense shortly after Trump returned to the White House for a second term.
Petro refused to receive U.S. military flights of deported migrants, acquiescing only after Trump threatened heavy tariffs on Colombian goods.
After Petro gave a speech at the United Nations General Assembly slamming U.S. support for Israel and calling on American troops to disobey Trump and “obey the orders of humanity,” the State Department announced it was revoking the visa of Petro and several of his family members.
In the fall, Trump accused Petro of failing to stop cocaine production — and of being a drug trafficker.
Washington removed Colombia’s certification that it is doing enough to eliminate cocaine crops and halted aid to the nation, which in 2023 surpassed $740 million. The Colombian government recalled its ambassador to the United States.
Tensions peaked after the U.S. bombed Caracas and captured Maduro last month.
Petro said the U.S. had “kidnapped” Maduro and dared Trump to launch a similar strike in Colombia. “Come get me. I’m waiting for you here,” he said.
Trump did not discard the possibility of a U.S. military operation in Colombia, saying, “It sounds good to me.”
Relations thawed with a Jan. 7 phone call between the leaders, in which they agreed to meet in person. The U.S. granted Petro a temporary visa so that he could visit the White House.
Colombian officials said Petro planned to focus on defending his record in deterring drug trafficking, even though cocaine production is rising in Colombia. Acting Justice Minister Andrés Idárraga Franco recently said that Petro’s administration has extradited more criminals to the United States than any of his conservative predecessors, including one accused trafficker who was delivered to U.S. authorities this week.
Reporters are typically allowed into the Oval Office to ask questions of ahead of meetings between Trump and other heads of state, but they were not on Tuesday.
Although Trump praised the meeting as productive, he tempered his praise.
“You know, he and I weren’t exactly the best of friends,” Trump said. “But I wasn’t insulted because I’d never met him. I didn’t know him at all. And we got along very well.”
Speaking to journalists at the Colombian Embassy in Washington after the meeting, Petro mentioned climate change and criticized the U.S. operation in Venezuela and what he described as the “genocide” in Gaza.
He said Trump gave him one of his trademark red ball caps. He said he took a pen to change Trump’s slogan, so that it now reads: “Make Americas Great Again.”
Times staff writer Ana Ceballos in Washington contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON — Venezuela risks “a second strike” if its interim government doesn’t acquiesce to U.S. demands. Cuba is “ready to fall,” and Colombia is “very sick, too.”
Iran may get “hit very hard” if its government cracks down on protesters. And Denmark risks U.S. intervention, as well, because “we need Greenland,” President Trump said.
In just 37 minutes while speaking with reporters Sunday aboard Air Force One, Trump threatened to attack five countries, both allies and adversaries, with the might of the U.S. military — an extraordinary turn for a president who built his political career rejecting traditional conservative views on the exercise of American power and vowing to put America first.
The president’s threats come as a third of the U.S. naval fleet remains stationed in the Caribbean, after Trump launched a daring attack on Venezuela that seized its president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife over the weekend.
The goal, U.S. officials said, was to show the Venezuelan government and the wider world what the American military is capable of — and to compel partners and foes alike to adhere to Trump’s demands through intimidation, rather than commit the U.S. military to more complex, conventional, long-term engagements.
It is the deployment of overwhelming and spectacular force in surgical military operations — Maduro’s capture, last year’s strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities, assassinations of Islamic State leadership and Iran’s top general in Iraq — that demonstrate Trump as a brazen leader willing to risk war, thereby effectively avoiding it, one Trump administration official said, explaining the president’s strategic thinking.
Yet experts and former Trump aides warn the president’s approach risks miscalculation, alienating vital allies and emboldening U.S. competitors.
At a Security Council meeting Monday at the United Nations in New York — called by Colombia, a long-standing and major non-North Atlantic Treaty Oranization ally to the United States — Trump’s moves were widely condemned. “Violations of the U.N. Charter,” a French diplomat told the council, “chips away at the very foundation of international order.”
Even the envoy from Russia, which has cultivated historically strong ties with the Trump administration, said the White House operation was an act of “banditry,” marking “a return to the era of illegality and American dominance through force, chaos and lawlessness.”
Trump’s threats to annex Greenland, an autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark with vast natural resources, drew particular concern across Europe on Monday, with leaders across the continent warning the United States against an attack that would violate the sovereignty of a NATO ally and European Union member state.
“That’s enough now,” Greenland’s prime minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, said after Trump told reporters that his attention would turn to the world’s largest island in a matter of weeks.
“If the United States decides to militarily attack another NATO country, then everything would stop,” Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, told local press. “That includes NATO, and therefore, post-World War II security.”
Trump also threatened to strike Iran, where anti-government protests have spread throughout the country in recent days. Trump had previously said the U.S. military was “locked and loaded” if Iranian security forces begin firing on protesters, “which is their custom.”
“The United States of America will come to their rescue,” Trump wrote on social media on Jan. 2, hours before launching the Venezuela mission. “We are locked and loaded and ready to go. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
In Colombia, there was widespread outrage after Trump threatened military action against leftist President Gustavo Petro, whom Trump accused, without evidence, of running “cocaine mills and cocaine factories.”
Petro is a frequent critic of the American president and has slammed as illegal a series of lethal U.S. airstrikes against alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific.
“Stop slandering me,” Petro wrote on X, warning that any U.S. attempts against his presidency “will unleash the people’s fury.”
Petro, a former leftist guerrilla, said he would go to war to defend Colombia.
“I swore not to touch a weapon again,” he said. “But for the homeland, I will take up arms.”
Trump’s threats have strained relations with Colombia, a devoted U.S. ally. For decades, the countries have shared military intelligence, a robust trade relationship and a multibillion-dollar fight against drug trafficking.
Even some of Petro’s domestic critics have comes to his defense. Presidential candidate Juan Manuel Galán, who opposes Petro’s rule, said Colombia’s sovereignty “must be defended.”
“Colombia is not Venezuela,” Galán wrote on X. “It is not a failed state, and we will not allow it to be treated as such. Here we have institutions, democracy and sovereignty that must be defended.”
The president of Mexico, another longtime U.S. ally and its largest trading partner, has also spoken out forcefully against the American operation in Caracas, and said the Trump administration’s aggressive foreign policy in Latin America threatens the stability of the region.
“We categorically reject intervention in the internal affairs of other countries,” President Claudia Sheinbaum said in her daily news conference Monday. “The history of Latin America is clear and compelling: Intervention has never brought democracy, has never generated well-being or lasting stability.”
She addressed Trump’s comments over the weekend that drugs were “pouring” through Mexico, and that the United States was “going to have to do something.”
Trump has been threatening action against cartels for months, with some members of his administration suggesting that the United States may soon carry out drone strikes on drug laboratories and other targets inside Mexican territory. Sheinbaum has repeatedly said such strikes would be a clear violation of Mexican sovereignty.
“Sovereignty and the self-determination of peoples are non-negotiable,” she said. “They are fundamental principles of international law and must always be respected without exception.”
Cuba also rejected Trump’s threat of a military intervention there, after Trump’s secretary of State, Marco Rubio, himself the descendant of Cuban immigrants, suggested that Havana may be next in Washington’s crosshairs.
“We call on the international community to stop this dangerous, aggressive escalation and to preserve peace,” Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel posted on social media.
The U.S. attacks on Venezuela, and Trump’s threats of additional military ventures, have caused deep unease in a relatively peaceful region that has seen fewer interstate wars in recent decades than Europe, Asia or Africa.
It also caused unease among some Trump supporters, who remembered his pledge to get the United States out of “endless” military conflicts for good.
“I was the first president in modern times,” Trump said, accepting the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, “to start no new wars.”
Wilner reported from Washington and Linthicum from Mexico City.
MEXICO CITY — They’re blowing up boats in the high seas, threatening tariffs from Brazil to Mexico and punishing anyone deemed hostile — while lavishing aid and praise on allies all aboard with the White House program.
Welcome to the Monroe Doctrine 2.0, the Trump administration’s bellicose, you’re-with-us-or-against-us approach to Latin America.
Not yet a year into his term, President Trump seems intent on putting his footprint in “America’s backyard” more than any recent predecessor. He came to office threatening to take back the Panama Canal, and now seems poised to launch a military attack on Venezuela and perhaps even drone strikes on cartel targets in Mexico. He vowed to withhold aid from Argentina if this week’s legislative elections didn’t go the way he wanted. They did.
The Navy’s USS Stockdale docks at the Frigate Captain Noel Antonio Rodriguez Justavino Naval Base, near entrance to the Panama Canal in Panama City, Panama, on Sept. 21.
(Enea Lebrun/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
“Every president comes in promising a new focus on Latin America, but the Trump administration is actually doing it,” said James Bosworth, whose firm provides regional risk analysis. “There is no country in the region that is not questioning how the U.S. is playing Latin America right now.”
Fearing a return to an era when U.S. intervention was the norm — from outright invasions to covert CIA operations to economic meddling — many Latin American leaders are trying to craft please-Trump strategies, with mixed success. But Trump’s transactional proclivities, mercurial outbursts and bullying nature make him a volatile negotiating partner.
“It’s all put Latin America on edge,” said Michael Shifter, past president of Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based research group. “It’s bewildering and dizzying and, I think, disorienting for everyone. People don’t know what’s coming next.”
In this super-charged update of U.S. gunboat diplomacy, critics say laws are being ignored, norms sidestepped and protocol set aside. The combative approach draws from some old standards: War on Drugs tactics, War on Terrorism rationales and Cold War saber-rattling.
Facilitating it all is the Trump administration’s formal designation of cartels as terrorist groups, a first. The shift has provided oratorical firepower, along with a questionable legal rationale, for the deadly “narco-terrorist” boat strikes, now numbering 14, in both the Caribbean and Pacific.
“The Al Qaeda of the Western Hemisphere,” is how Pete Hegseth, Trump’s defense secretary, has labeled cartels, as he posts video game-esque footage of boats and their crews being blown to bits.
Lost is an essential distinction: Cartels, while homicidal, are driven by profits. Al Qaeda and other terror groups typically proclaim ideological motives.
Another aberration: Trump doesn’t see the need to seek congressional approval for military action in Venezuela.
“I don’t think we’re necessarily going to ask for a declaration of war,” Trump said. “I think we’re just gonna kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. We’re going to kill them. They’re going to be, like, dead.”
A supporter of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro wearing a T-shirt depicting President Trump and the slogan “Yankee go home” takes part in a rally on Thursday in Caracas against U.S. military activity in the Caribbean.
(Federico Parra/AFP via Getty Images)
Trump’s unpredictability has cowed many in the region. One of the few leaders pushing back is Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who, like Trump, has a habit of incendiary, off-the-cuff comments and social media posts.
The former leftist guerrilla — who already accused Trump of abetting genocide in Gaza — said Washington’s boat-bombing spree killed at least one Colombian fisherman. Petro called the operation part of a scheme to topple the leftist government in neighboring Venezuela.
Trump quickly sought to make an example of Petro, labeling him “an illegal drug leader” and threatening to slash aid to Colombia, while his administration imposed sanctions on Petro, his wife, son and a top deputy. Like the recent deployment of thousands of U.S. troops, battleships and fighter jets in the Caribbean, Trump’s response was a calculated display of power — a show of force designed to brow-beat doubters into submission.
At a rally in support of Colombian President Gustavo Petro in Bogota on Oct. 24, a demonstrator carries a sign that demands respect for Colombia and declares that, contrary to Trump’s claims, Petro is not a drug trafficker.
(Juancho Torres/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Amid the whirlwind turns in U.S.-Latin American relations, the rapid unraveling of U.S.-Colombia relations has been especially startling. For decades Colombia has been the linchpin of Washington’s anti-drug efforts in South America as well as a major trade partner.
Unlike Colombia and Mexico, Venezuela is a relatively minor player in the U.S.-bound narcotics trade, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. And yet the White House has cast Venezuela’s socialist president, Nicolás Maduro, as an all-powerful kingpin “poisoning” American streets with crime and drugs. It put a $50-million bounty on Maduro’s head and massed an armada off the coast of Venezuela, home to the world’s largest petroleum reserves.
President Trump talks during a Cabinet meeting at the White House on Oct. 9. Others, from left to right are, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
(Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
An exuberant cheerleader for the shoot-first-and-ask-no-questions-later posture is Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has for years advocated for the ouster of left-wing governments in Havana and Caracas. In a recent swing through the region, Rubio argued for a more muscular interdiction strategy.
“What will stop them is when you blow them up,” Rubio told reporters in Mexico City. “You get rid of them.”
That mindset is “chillingly familiar for many people in Latin America,” said David Adler, of the think tank Progressive International. “Again, you’re doing extrajudicial killings in the name of a war on drugs.”
U.S. intervention in Latin America dates back more than 200 years, when President James Monroe declared that the United States would reign as the hemispheric hegemon.
In ensuing centuries, the U.S. invaded Mexico and annexed half its territory, dispatched Marines to Nicaragua and Haiti and abetted coups from Chile to Brazil to Guatemala. It enforced a decades-long embargo against communist Cuba — while also launching a botched invasion of the island and trying to assassinate its leader —and imposed economic sanctions on left-wing adversaries in Nicaragua and Venezuela.
Motivations for these interventions varied from fighting communism to protecting U.S. business interests to waging a war on drugs. The most recent full-on U.S. assault against a Latin American nation — the 1989 invasion of Panama — also was framed as an anti-drug crusade. President George H.W. Bush described the country’s authoritarian leader, Gen. Manuel Noriega, as a “drug-running dictator,” language that is nearly identical to current White House descriptions of Maduro.
American Army troops arrive in Panama to depose former ally Manuel Noriega in 1989.
(Jason Bleibtreu/Sygma via Getty Images)
But a U.S. military invasion of Venezuela presents a challenge of a different magnitude.
Venezuela is 10 times larger than Panama, and its population of 28 million is also more than tenfold that of Panama’s in 1989. Many predict that a potential U.S. attack would face stiff resistance.
And if curtailing drug use is really the aim of Trump’s policy, leaders from Venezuela to Colombia to Mexico say, perhaps Trump should focus on curtailing addiction in the U.S., which is the world’s largest consumer of drugs.
To many, the buildup to a potential intervention in Venezuela mirrors the era preceding the 2003 Iraq war, when the White House touted not drug trafficking but weapons of mass destruction — which turned out to be nonexistent — as a casus belli.
Iraqi officers surrender to U.S. troops on a road near Safwan, Iraq, in March, 2003.
(Gilles Bassignac/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
“Somehow, the United States of America has found a way to combine two of its greatest foreign policy failures — the Iraq War and the War on Drugs — into a single regime change narrative,” Adler said.
Further confounding U.S.-Latin American relations is Trump’s personality-driven style: his unabashed affection for certain leaders and disdain for others.
While Venezuela’s Maduro and Colombia’s Petro sit atop the bad-hombre list, Argentine President Javier Milei and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele — the latter the self-described “world’s coolest dictator” — are the darlings of the moment.
President Trump greets Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele as he arrives at the White House on April 14.
(Al Drago/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Trump has given billions of dollars in aid to bail out the right-wing Milei, a die-hard Trump loyalist and free-market ideologue. The administration has paid Bukele’s administration millions to house deportees, while maintaining the protected status of more than 170,000 Salvadoran immigrants in the U.S.
“It’s a carrot-and-stick approach,” said Sergio Berensztein, an Argentina political analyst. “It’s fortunate for Argentina that it gets the carrot. But Venezuela and Colombia get the stick.”
Trump has given mixed signals on Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum and Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The two leftists lead the region’s largest nations.
Trump has wielded the tariff cudgel against both countries: Mexico ostensibly because of drug trafficking; Brazil because of what Trump calls a “witch hunt” against former president Jair Bolsonaro, a right-wing Trump favorite convicted of attempting a coup after he, like Trump, lost a bid for reelection.
Paradoxically, Trump has expressed affection for both Lula and Sheinbaum, calling Lula on his 80th birthday “a very vigorous guy” (Trump is 79) and hailing Sheinbaum as a “lovely woman,” but adding: “She’s so afraid of the cartels that she can’t even think straight.”
Sheinbaum, caught in the crosswinds of shifting policy dictates from Washington, has so far been able to fight off Trump’s most drastic tariff threats. Mexico’s reliance on the U.S. market highlights a fundamental truth: Even with China expanding its influence, the U.S. still reigns as the region’s economic and military superpower.
Sheinbaum has avoided the kind of barbed ripostes that tend to trigger Trump’s rage, even as U.S. strikes on alleged drug boats creep closer to Mexico’s shores. Publicly at least, she seldom shows frustration or exasperation, once musing: “President Trump has his own, very special way of communicating.”
Special correspondents Cecilia Sánchez Vidal in Mexico City and Andrés D’Alessandro in Buenos Aires contributed to this report.
The Venezuelan government will reportedly shut down Petro (PTR), its state-issued, oil-backed crypto, which was subject to controversy and did not see mass adoption by citizens in the country.
According to reports, crypto wallets on the Patria website, the trading platform for Venezuela’s Petro, will cease operations on Monday, Jan. 15, with the remaining Petro converted to bolivar, the country’s fiat currency.
Petro’s demise comes nearly six years after its official launch in 2018. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro said at the time that the crypto will help to circumvent harsh sanctions by the US government and also help the country’s collapsing economy.
However, the state-issued cryptocurrency which was an ambitious project, failed to see widespread adoption among citizens, with the country’s legislators labeling the token as unconstitutional in 2018 before its official launch.
Despite criticism from within and outside Venezuela, Maduro’s administration continued to forge ahead with Petro, stating that passport fees would be paid in PTR. In 2020, the President stressed that the token will play a critical role in Venezuela’s economic recovery.
While Petro may not have enjoyed mass adoption, Venezuelans embraced other cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin.
Opposition leader Leopoldo López reportedly endorsed crypto, saying it helped Venezuela’s citizens preserve their savings from the continuous devaluation of the bolivar.
