Colombia’s government on January 26 refused to allow two U.S. military planes to land. They were returning Colombian deportees from the United States to their homeland.
In taking action, Petro was insisting that the deportees traveling handcuffed in a military plane were not criminals and ought to be treated with dignity. Similar scenarios were playing out in Brazil and Mexico. Reacting, the U.S. government immediately imposed a 25% tax on imports from Colombia; it would be 50% in a week. Colombia responded with similar tariffs on imported U.S. goods.
The U.S. government sanctioned members of Colombia’s government and Petro’s political party, announcing that they would no longer receive visas for travel to the United States. Petro, in turn, indicated that over 15,000 U.S. citizens living in Colombia without authorization would be called in to “modify their situation.”
Petro erupted. He sent a message on social media to Trump that, in the annals of communication between two heads of state, has to be extraordinary:
Trump, I don’t like to travel much to the United States. It’s a little boring, but I do confess that there are worthwhile things. I like to go to the black neighborhoods in Washington. There I once saw a big fight in the U.S. capital between Blacks and Latinos, with barricades. I thought it was bullshit, because they ought to be uniting.
I confess that I like Walt Whitman and Paul Simon and Noam Chomsky and Arthur Miller.
I confess that Sacco and Vanzetti are in my blood. They are memorable in U.S. history and are an inspiration. As leaders for the workers, they were killed in the electric chair, by fascists inside the U.S.− inside my country too.
I don’t like your oil, Trump. It’s going to wipe out the human species, because of greed. Maybe someday over a shot of whiskey, which I accept despite my gastritis, we can talk frankly about this. But it’s difficult because you consider me as of an inferior race. I am not that, nor is any Colombian.
If you want to know someone who is stubborn, that’s me, for sure. With your economic strength and your arrogance, you can go ahead and stage a coup d’état, as was done with Allende. But I die according to my own rules. I resisted torture and I resist you.
I don’t want slavers on Colombia’s side, we’ve already had a lot of them, and we freed ourselves. Who I want on Colombia’s side are lovers of freedom. If you can’t be like that with me, I will go elsewhere. Colombia is the heart of the world and you don’t understand. This is the land of the yellow butterflies and beauty of Remedios, but also of the colonels Aureliano Buendia, and I am one of them, maybe the last one. (1)
You’ll kill me, but I will survive in my town, which came before yours in the Americas. We are people of the winds, the mountains, of the Caribbean Sea and of freedom.
You don’t like our freedom. OK, I do not shake hands with white slavers. I shake the hands of the white liberty-loving heirs of Lincoln and of U.S. farm boys, Black and white. I wept before their graves and prayed on their battlefield. I went there after walking the mountains of Italian Tuscany and after saving myself from covid.
They represent the U.S. and I kneel before them and no one else. Knock me down, President, and the Americas and humanity will answer.
Colombians, right now, stop looking north. Look at the world. We come from the blood of the caliphate of Cordoba, from that civilization back then, of the Roman Latins, of the Mediterranean, the ones who founded the Republic, the Athenian democracy. Ours is the blood of Black people turned into slaves by you. They resisted. The first free territory of America is in Colombia, first in all of America, before [George] Washington.” I take refuge there, in their songs from Africa.
My land is of gold work existing in the time of the Egyptian pharaohs, and of the first artists of the world, in Chiribiquete. (2)
You will never take us over. The warrior who rode through our lands, crying out freedom, and whose name is Bolivar is on our side.
Our peoples are a little wary, on the timid side. They are naive and friendly − they are lovers − but they’ll find out how to win back the Panama Canal, which you took away from us, with violence. Two hundred heroes from all over Latin America lie in Bocas del Toro in present-day Panama, formerly Colombia. You assassinated them.
I raise a flag and, as Gaitan said, it will continue to be raised with Latin American dignity even if I am alone. (3) Mr. immigrant president of the United States, that’s the dignity of America, about which your great-grandfather knew nothing, but mine did.
Your blockade does not scare me; because Colombia, besides being the country of beauty, is the heart of the world. I know you love beauty and respect it as I do, and know it will bring you sweetness.
COLOMBIA, FROM NOW ON IS OPEN TO THE WHOLE WORLD WITH OPEN ARMS; WE ARE BUILDERS OF FREEDOM, LIFE, AND HUMANITY.
They tell me you put a 50% tariff on what is the fruit of our human labor, as it enters the United States. I do the same.
May our people plant corn that was discovered in Colombia and feeds the world.
The author translated.
Here are notes for Petro’s remarks:
1.) Charismatic Colombian political leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán − lawyer, defender of social reforms, opponent of deadly violence associated with land reform − was assassinated in 1948 prior to presidential elections he was sure to win. Decades of civil war followed; hundreds of thousands died.
2.) According to UNESCO, “The first inhabitants of Amazonia practiced their art on the rock walls of Chiribiquete … [which] even today considered to be of mythical importance by several groups and is designated the ‘Great Home of the Animals.’”
3.) Petro is recalling Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.
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How do we explain Petro’s unusual communication? Maybe the plane episode reminded him of Colombia’s situation as vassal state under the Monroe Doctrine. Perhaps he resented what he regarded as U.S. trashing of its most loyal ally in Latin America. Petro may view U.S. maltreatment of Colombian deportees as symptomatic of longstanding U.S. sponsorship of militarization and violence in Colombia, something that contradicts “total peace” in Colombia, a prime goal of his presidency.
The fracas ended within hours. The U.S. government announced tariffs were off and that Colombia had agreed to U.S. military planes transferring deportees to Colombia. The Petro government insisted they would be treated with dignity. Maybe handcuffs are off limits. Colombia’s foreign minister and ambassador in Washington were heading there to meet with U.S. officials.
On January 28, two Colombian Air Force plans arrived in Bogota with 200 migrants deported by the United States. Said Petro: “They are Colombians, are free and worthy and are in their country where they are wanted.”
One big issue is the lying, clearly. The mantra of Trump and his supporters claims that most undocumented immigrants are the worst kind of criminals. Now political leaders abroad, at least in Latin America, join the U.S. public in having to deal with the lie. President Petro was struggling to do so, it seems.
It is a lie. A 2024 study in Texas supported by the National Institute of Justice “found that undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half the rate of native-born U.S. citizens for violent and drug crimes and a quarter the rate of native-born citizens for property crimes.”
Deportees traditionally are pawns, used and soon forgotten. As the song Deportee says: “You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane/All they will call you will be “deportees”/… We died in your hills, we died in your deserts/ We died in your valleys and died on your plains.”
Woody Guthrie in his song was reflecting on a plane crash in 1948 that killed 28 farmworkers being returned from California to Mexico. The news stories had no names, just “deportees.”
