Last week, after Donald Trump sent the United States military into Venezuela to abduct President Nicolás Maduro, President Gustavo Petro of Colombia criticized it as an act of “aggression against the sovereignty of Venezuela and Latin America.” It was the latest in an escalating series of jibes between two countries that have historically been allies. In response, Trump called Petro a “sick man” who was involved in shipping cocaine to the U.S., said that he should “watch his ass,” and told reporters that a military operation against Petro “sounds good to me.”
Petro, like Trump, is a compulsive user of social media, and though aides have tried to restrain his messaging, he has become Trump’s most outspoken leftist critic in the region. After the U.S. began striking alleged drug boats in the waters off Venezuela, this past September, Petro derided Trump as a “barbarian” and the campaign as “murder.” (He also suggested that the campaign was intended to distract from the Epstein files, warning that “a clan of pedophiles wants to destroy our democracy.”) Trump called Petro a “thug,” accused him of being an “illegal drug leader,” and placed sanctions on him and members of his family.
Trump’s incursion into Venezuela seemed to have brought the relationship to a dangerous inflection point. Petro called for rallies to be held across Colombia on January 7th, “in defense of the national sovereignty.” In an impassioned video shared through social media, he recalled an old adage predicting that the eagle (the United States) would one day attack the jaguar (the people of Colombia). “Be careful, Trump and Rubio,” he said. “If the golden eagle dares to attack, they will find the jaguar awakening powerfully, and history will be changed forever.”
That evening, in Bogota’s Plaza de Bolívar, a chanting crowd waved Colombian flags and held up placards: “Shitty Gringos, Respect Colombia,” “Petro Is Not a Narcotrafficker.” Petro, who is not known for his punctuality, arrived an hour and a half late. A man of moderate height with professorial glasses and longish hair, he stood with an entourage of aides and bodyguards on a stage surrounded with Christmas lights left over from recent festivities. A cheer went up as he came to the microphone. Petro announced that he had prepared another speech, but at the last minute something had happened to change his mind.
People’s phones were already flashing with a news alert that Petro and Trump had spoken by phone. After half an hour of folksy disquisition, Petro finally got around to describing the conversation. He told the crowd that he and Trump had recognized that “if we don’t talk, we’re screwed. We’ll kill each other.” The risk of an attack had ebbed, but the outcome would ultimately depend on a meeting between the two leaders.
After years of fiercely criticizing Trump, Petro surprised the crowd by saying that he and the American President had agreed on some things. One was a sense of the evils of narcotrafficking; Petro recited a litany of statistics about Colombia’s efforts to halt drug smuggling. The people in the plaza alternately booed and clapped, unsure whether to welcome the détente. Memes circulated afterward suggesting that Petro had caved to Trump, or that the two were newfound amigos. To compound the surreal mood, Petro’s office issued a meme that showed a bald eagle snuggling up to a jaguar.
Two days later, Petro agreed to speak with me in his office. I arrived on time, then waited for several hours while Petro held an emergency meeting with the commander of his security forces. Finally, an aide explained that another concern had arisen: Petro had received a note from Trump, inviting him to Washington on February 3rd, and had summoned his cabinet to discuss it. But, the aide said, the President would see me first. While his ministers gathered in a hallway, Petro spoke with me for ninety minutes.
Petro sat in a favorite leather armchair, dressed comfortably in sneakers, slacks, and a white cardigan; a female assistant was combing his hair. The office had the lived-in look of a grad-school apartment. There was a blanket folded on the couch, and papers and books chaotically piled on a coffee table and a desk. A rumpled paper map of Colombia hung on an easel. Among the bric-a-brac was a large collection of hats—baseball caps, wide-brimmed straw hats, an Indigenous headdress with green and red parrot feathers.
Petro was characteristically unhurried. The last time I had seen him was in 2023, near the end of his first year in office. Then, as ever, Petro had seemed to inhabit his own thoughts, speaking for more than two hours on a sprawling range of topics. He talked at length about a book on capitalism and climate change that he was writing between Presidential obligations. He also complained that the palace was cold and uncomfortable. When a Presidential military band in the plaza outside struck up its usual afternoon tune, he closed the shutters and grimaced, saying that they drove him crazy.
Now sixty-five, Petro is a survivor of a brutal era in which the Colombian state assassinated leftist leaders and butchered their followers, in an effort to quell the country’s Marxist guerrilla forces. The death toll over thirty-five years is estimated to be well more than four hundred thousand. In the eighties, Petro was a member of the M-19, urban insurgents who caught the world’s attention by taking the American Ambassador and more than a dozen other foreign diplomats hostage for two months. They also seized the country’s Palace of Justice, in a bloody showdown.
Petro entered politics in the nineties, after Colombia’s government agreed to an amnesty, and served as a congressman and as the mayor of Bogotá. In 2022, he became the country’s first left-wing President. He began his first term with a dramatic speech at the U.N. General Assembly, in which he called for a halt to global hydrocarbon use and for a new policy of decriminalization to end the bloody, futile war on drugs. He also announced a “Total Peace” effort to solve his country’s myriad insurgencies by negotiating with all the fighting factions.
Not many of these goals have been achieved; Petro’s Presidential initiatives have been largely symbolic. As the number of armed fighters in the countryside seems only to have grown, Petro has broken off talks and gone to war, dismissing the rebels as dressed-up drug pushers. He has also made little headway on decriminalizing drugs. Despite having once claimed that “cocaine is no more harmful than whiskey,” he now talks mostly about the coca crops his government has destroyed. As for his climate-change agenda, he has halted new petroleum exploration, but Colombia still exports oil and coal; because of the abrupt transition, it must import natural gas to meet its needs.
Petro’s self-assured stubbornness has won him many adversaries, but, in the Plaza de Bolívar, his followers called out to him with almost religious fervor. By getting elected and surviving in office, he has reversed the state’s repression of leftist groups. In a gesture to the working class, he has extended universal pensions to elderly Colombians and raised the minimum wage by twenty-four per cent. Skeptics in the business community say that the increased wages will simply inflate prices. Nevertheless, in a country with widespread poverty, such efforts resonate. In recent polls, roughly a quarter of Colombians say that they regard themselves as leftists—a measure of what Petro calls “the desire for change in an unequal country.”
After the U.S. attacked Caracas, Petro went on X to suggest that a historical line had been crossed: “The first South American capital bombed, like the Hitlerian bombing of Guernica, cannot be forgotten. Friends do not bomb.” When I asked about the tumult in the region, he began by saying that he had liked and admired Hugo Chávez, who set in motion Venezuela’s “Bolivarian revolution” a quarter century ago. He didn’t feel the same way about Chávez’s successor, Maduro. Although he rejected Trump’s claims that Maduro was a drug trafficker—“First of all, they don’t have coca fields. That’s in Colombia”—he expressed little admiration. “Chávez’s movement ended up in Maduro’s hands, and became a series of factions, including the military, that wanted to control oil,” he said. “The Maduro model in its final stage brought on a process of degradation that still hasn’t bottomed out.”
Trump had made it clear that he was leaving Maduro’s Vice-President, Delcy Rodríguez, in charge. Petro described Rodríguez as a friend and said that he would help her however he could. It would not be easy for her to accommodate the more militant members of her security forces while also appeasing the U.S. But he said that he hoped her government would be able to find a way forward: “As long as there is trust and elections are called, Trump is going to realize that either he becomes more violent, with increasingly serious problems—in Venezuela, in the world, and in his own country—or he gets involved in the rules of the game that already exist.”
Before the recent call, Petro’s contact with Trump came largely in the form of trash talk online. “From the first day of Trump’s government, there was never any communication with us,” he told me. “If two Presidents don’t communicate, the governments fill that vacuum with another force.” At the start of Trump’s second term, the U.S. deported Colombian nationals in shackles on military planes, and Petro prohibited the aircraft from landing in Colombia. In a Twitter exchange that stretched on for most of a day, Trump ranted at Petro and threatened sharp tariffs on Colombian exports, while Petro likened himself to a rebellious, doomed hero of Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”
Petro finally assented, after several former Colombian Presidents offered to help smooth things over, and the relationship calmed down. But the episode prefigured Trump’s dealings with leaders of other nations, from Canada to Panama. “I thought all the Presidents were going to do the same,” Petro said, recalling his initial defiance. Instead, they mostly chose to appease the U.S.
The recent call came about at the urging of Senator Rand Paul, of Kentucky. The timing was not auspicious. The night before, Petro had gone on X to reject accusations that he was involved in narcotrafficking, writing, “The title that Trump assigns me as an outlaw of the drug trade is a reflection of his senile brain.” But Petro told me that Trump had struck a light tone when they spoke. “He didn’t want to get involved in substantive discussions,” he said. “He simply wanted to build communication.” When Petro insisted that the accusations of his involvement in the drug trade were false, Trump was solicitous: “He said, ‘You’re surrounded by lies, just like me.’ ”
Affinity will go only so far. In the forthcoming meeting in Washington, Trump is likely to insist that Colombia offer coöperation on immigration and natural resources, two areas in which he and Petro have strikingly different views. In Petro’s telling, right-wing politicians throughout the world have cynically used immigration as a wedge issue. “The fear of foreigners is the same as what existed in Germany regarding the Jews,” he said. “What it generates are far-right political proposals,” which “arise from fear and lies.”
Trump is also likely to demand that Petro and Delcy Rodríguez take on the Ejército de Liberación Nacional, Colombia’s largest guerrilla group. The E.L.N. controls much of the border between the two countries, in addition to large portions of Venezuela’s interior—including the area where its valuable minerals are concentrated. The E.L.N. operated with Maduro’s approval, and is believed to have allies in the Venezuelan security forces. Trump’s intervention is unlikely to succeed unless the E.L.N. can be brought under control.
Petro told me that he wanted to offer Trump a deal. “I’m going to propose the alliance you want, but on the basis of clean energy,” he said. He recalled writing to Trump some time ago, proposing a “Pact of the Americas” to help solve environmental crises. Petro didn’t think that Trump read the letter, but he still hoped to make a persuasive pitch. “We would push the climate crisis further back,” he said. “It would be a service to humanity.” If that failed, he said, he would emphasize that he and Trump were aligned against narco gangs: “You don’t have a better warrior in Colombia against drug trafficking than me. Thirty-five per cent of the Senate ended up in jail thanks to me. I denounced the mafias that governed Colombia.”
It was not lost on Petro that Trump has withdrawn from every global initiative on climate change and conservation. “Trump’s vision is to seize oil, seize coal,” he said. He suggested that it was an inevitable effect of capitalist consumption. “The idea of private property has led them to think that oil and everything underground belongs to the landowner,” he said. “That doesn’t exist in Latin America. And when Trump says, ‘We took the oil,’ ‘They stole our oil,’ etc., those are phrases that are steeped in that culture.”
He suggested that the U.S. was dismantling the international system out of anxiety. “When the United States begins to fear losing global control to China, the desperation to control coal and oil reserves increases exponentially,” he told me. In Venezuela, where China is the largest buyer of oil, the competition between the two superpowers had become strikingly direct. If it wasn’t handled carefully, Petro said, “a world war will break out.”
Petro saw dire stakes. “The climate crisis brings barbarism because it brings migration,” he said. “There are three billion people who are going to go north if we let nothing happen between now and 2070. We’re heading toward World War III and climate collapse combined. That’s called the collapse of humanity.” Already, he said, “the United States is a society on the verge of division. Smart politicians unite people. Those who lead to collapse will be forgotten. Trump needs to understand that.”
Ultimately, Petro may not have much leverage, in the U.S. or at home. With eight months remaining in his term, Colombia is as much drawn to the right as to the left. Its Army, one of the largest in the hemisphere, is closely tied to the United States. When I asked Petro what he intended to do after leaving office, he said that it depended on whether he remained under sanctions, which prevented him from travelling to the U.S. He explained, a little wistfully, that he used to visit often, attending talks and giving speeches.
Back when Petro was a guerrilla, the M-19 carried out a symbolic operation to steal a sword that once belonged to the nineteenth-century liberator Simón Bolívar. In his office, Petro showed a hint of his old bravado when we spoke about his recent appearance in the Plaza de Bolívar. He had talked ruefully that night about having written a more forceful speech, and I asked what he’d had in mind. Was he planning to come out waving a machete and calling for armed struggle? “Kind of, yes,” he said, chuckling. What would have happened if he’d given that speech? Would Trump have come after him? Petro smiled and suggested that he would have been ready. “We’ve survived by moving and living clandestinely our whole lives,” he said. “A person like me has to know how to disguise himself.” ♦
