United States President Donald Trump has invited Colombian leader Gustavo Petro to the White House, days after accusing him of trafficking cocaine and threatening military action against his government.<\/p>\n
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The sudden detente on Wednesday followed an hour-long phone call between Trump and Petro, in which the two leaders discussed \u201cthe situation of drugs\u201d and \u201cother disagreements\u201d, according to the US president.<\/p>\n
It was their first call since Trump\u2019s threat of a military operation in Colombia following the US\u2019s abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in a brazen attack on Caracas on Saturday. The warnings prompted Petro to issue a call for Colombians to take to the streets to defend their sovereignty.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a Great Honour to speak with the President of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, who called to explain the situation of drugs and other disagreements that we have had,\u201d Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.<\/p>\n
\u201cI appreciated his call and tone and look forward to meeting him in the near future.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump added \u201carrangements are being made\u201d for a meeting in Washington between himself and Petro, but gave no specific date for a meeting.<\/p>\n
Petro, Colombia\u2019s first left-wing president, addressed demonstrators who had heeded his call for protests at Bogota\u2019s Plaza Bolivar following the call with Trump. He said a detente was under way and that he had to change his speech at the last minute.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf we don\u2019t speak, there is war. Colombia\u2019s history has taught us that,\u201d the former rebel fighter said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd what happened is that we talked and re-established communication for the first time. I talked about two things: Venezuela and the issue of drug trafficking,\u201d he said. \u201cI gave him our numbers of what we are doing to fight drugs.\u201d<\/p>\n
Petro also accused Colombian politicians of misleading Trump. \u201cThose [people] are responsible for this crisis \u2013 let\u2019s call it diplomatic for now, verbal for now \u2013 that has erupted between the US and Colombia,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Relations between Trump and Petro have been frosty since the Republican returned to the White House in January 2025.<\/p>\n
Trump has repeatedly accused Petro\u2019s administration, without evidence, of enabling a steady flow of \u200ccocaine into the US, imposing sanctions on the Colombian leader in October.<\/p>\n
Earlier this week, Trump described Petro as \u201ca sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States\u201d and that he should \u201cwatch his a**\u201d following the US attack on Venezuela.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s not going to be doing it very long, let me tell you,\u201d Trump told reporters on Sunday, and said a military operation there \u201csounds good.\u201d<\/p>\n
For his part, Petro had condemned the US attack on Venezuela as \u201cabhorrent\u201d, convened emergency meetings before the United Nations and the Organization of American States and even threatened to take up arms again to defend Colombia.<\/p>\n
Petro and Trump also sparred last year when Colombia initially banned deportation flights from the US. \u00a0Washington in September also \u2060revoked Petro\u2019s visa after he joined a pro-Palestinian demonstration in New York following a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly and called on American soldiers to \u201cdisobey the orders of Trump\u201d.<\/p>\n
Petro, who has been a vocal opponent of Israel\u2019s war in Gaza, had accused \u200cTrump of being \u201ccomplicit in genocide\u201d in Gaza and called for \u201ccriminal proceedings\u201d over US missile attacks on suspected drug-running boats in Caribbean waters.<\/p>\n
Despite the tensions, for Colombia, the US remains critical to the military\u2019s fight against left-wing rebels and drug traffickers. Washington has provided Bogota with roughly $14bn in the last two decades.<\/p>\n
For the US, Colombia remains the main source of intelligence used to interdict drugs in the Caribbean, and the cornerstone of its counternarcotics strategy abroad.<\/p>\n
Colombia is also a \u201cMajor non-NATO ally\u201d of the US \u2013 a designation that only belongs to a handful of countries like Australia, Japan and Qatar.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe relationship between presidents Trump and Petro is volatile and unpredictable,\u201d said Anthea McCarthy-Jones, an expert in Latin America affairs at the University of New South Wales.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt seems to oscillate from exchanges involving threats and inflammatory language to more reasoned attempts to use diplomacy as a way forward,\u201d she told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n
Colombia\u2019s government, meanwhile, said cooperation between the two countries on intelligence, defence and law enforcement was continuing.<\/p>\n
Colombia\u2019s defence minister Pedro Sanchez told The New York Times this week that the \u201cNavy, Coast Guard, Drug Enforcement Administration, Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives\u201d have been uninterrupted.<\/p>\n
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Trump invites Colombia\u2019s Petro to White House after threats Sudden detente follows a phone call between the two leaders in which they discussed drugs and \u2018other disagreements\u2019, Trump says. United States President Donald Trump has invited Colombian leader Gustavo Petro to the White House, days after accusing him of trafficking cocaine and threatening military action […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":411,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-410","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsliked.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsliked.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsliked.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsliked.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsliked.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=410"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/newsliked.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":412,"href":"https:\/\/newsliked.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410\/revisions\/412"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsliked.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsliked.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsliked.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsliked.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}