Trump the Peace President, making friends in Latin America …

Trump decided to screw around with Colombia. As NBC reports (in a cautiously Trump-friendly tone), Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro wasn’t in the mood to screw around with his nonsense. (1) He posted a long message on co-President Elon Musk’s X (Twitter) (2), which I’ve translated below in full.

The gist of it is: Bite me, you orange freak who had everything in life handed to you by Daddy while you were sitting on a golden toilet. (Though put somewhat more diplomatically.) Including reminding Trump that Colombia from its point of view has a more legitimate claim on the Panama Canal than the US does. (3)

After NBC’s Trump-made-Colombia-back-down introductory framing, the article goes on to explain that Colombia (like Mexico) will accept Colombian citizens being returned by the US but will insist that the Orange Freak do it legally.

Mexico and Brazil also don’t appear to be in the mood to accept whatever crap Trump serves up to them (NBC):

Mexico temporarily blocked two U.S. planes with 80 passengers each from landing last week, frustrating deportation plans and sparking tensions. While the issue was resolved, Mexican officials have express[ed] opposition to the United States’ unilateral actions around immigration policy.

In a statement on X, Petro criticized the use of military planes for deportation.

“A migrant is not a criminal and should be treated with the dignity a human being deserves,” he wrote. “We will receive our nationals in civilian airplanes, without treating them as criminals. Colombia must be respected.”

The Brazilian government condemned what it described as the degrading treatment of its nationals who were on an ICE repatriation flight Friday, citing the use of handcuffs, a broken air conditioning system and other violations of a bilateral agreement that ensures humane treatment. [my emphasis]

But these Latino nations have to accept whatever Trump gives them, right? It’s not like they have the option to take more aid and loans and do more business with China or something … oh, wait.

FRANCE 24 carried this report on the initial announcement: (4)



Here is my translation of Petro’s X post (4), also shown in a screen-capture below.

Trump, I don't like to travel to the U.S. very much, it's a bit boring, but I confess that there are meritorious things, I like to go to the black neighborhoods of Washington, there I saw a whole fight in the capital of the U.S. between blacks and Latinos with barricades, which I thought was bulls**t, because they should unite.

I confess that I like Walt Whitman and Paul Simon and Noam Chomsky and [Henry?] Miller.

I confess that Sacco and Vanzetti, who have my own blood, in the history of the United States, are memorable and I follow them. They were assassinated because they were labor leaders by electric chair, the fascists who are inside the U.S. as well as inside my country, by the fascists who inside the US just as they are inside my country.

I don't like your oil, Trump, it's going to wipe out the human species because of greed. Maybe one day, with a drink of whiskey that I accept, despite my gastritis, we can talk frankly about this. But it is difficult because you consider me an inferior race and I am not, nor is any Colombian.

So if you know someone who’s stubborn, that's me, period. [Your country] with its economic strength and arrogance can try to carry out a coup d'état as they did with [Chile’s Salvador] Allende. But I will die in my law, I have resisted torture, and I am resisting you. I don't want slave owners on the side of Colombia, we already had many and we freed ourselves. What I want on the side of Colombia are lovers of freedom. If you can't accompany me, I'll go somewhere else. Colombía is the heart of the world and you did not understand it, this is the land of yellow butterflies, of the beauty of Remedios, but also of Colonels Aurelianos Buendía, of whom I am one of them, perhaps the last.

You may kill me, but I will survive among my people, which is older than yours in the Americas. We are peoples of the winds, the mountains, the Caribbean Sea and freedom .

You don't like our freedom, okay. I don't reach out my hand to white slavers. I reach out to the liberty-loving white heirs of Lincoln and the black and white farm boys of the United States, before whose graves I have cried and prayed on a battlefield, where I arrived, after walking mountains in Italian Tuscany and after recovering from Covid.

They are the United States, and I bow down to them, no one else.

Knock me down, President, and the Americas and humanity will respond to you.

Colombia is now no longer looking to the north, It looks to the world. Our blood comes from the blood of the Caliphate of Cordoba, the civilization at that time, of the Latin Roman Latins of the Mediterranean, the civilization of that time, who founded the republic, the democracy in Athens. Our is that has the black resisters turned into slaves by you. Colombia is the first free territory in America, before Washington, in all of America, and there I take refuge in its African songs.

Colombia is now no longer looking to the north, It looks to the world. Our blood comes from the blood of the Caliphate of Cordoba, the civilization at that time, of the Latin Roman Latins of the Mediterranean, the civilization of that time, who founded the republic, the democracy in Athens. Our is that has the black resisters turned into slaves by you. Colombia is the first free territory in America, before Washington, in all of America, and there I take refuge in its African songs.

My land is one of goldsmithing that existed in the time of the Egyptian pharaohs, and of the first artists of the world in Chiribiquete.

You will never dominate us. The warrior who rode our lands, shouting freedom and whose name is Bolívar will oppose you.

Our peoples are somewhat fearful, somewhat apprehensive. They are naïve and kind, lovers, but they will know how to win the Panama Canal, which you took from us with violence. Two hundred heroes from all over Latin America lie in Bocas del Toro, present-day Panama, formerly Colombia, which you [the US] assassinated.

I raise a flag and as [Jorge Eliécer] Gaitán said, even if you are alone, you will continue to fly with the Latin American dignity, that is the dignity of America, which your great-grandfather did not know, and mine did, Mr. President, as an immigrant to the United States.

Your blocking does not scare me; because Colombia, in addition to being the country of beauty, is the heart of the world. I know you love beauty like I do, don't disrespect it and it will give you its sweetness.

FROM TODAY ON, COLOMBIA OPENS UP TO THE WHOLE WORLD, WITH OPEN ARMS, WE ARE BUILDERS OF FREEDOM, LIFE AND HUMANITY.

They inform me that you put a 50% tariff on our fruit of human labor to enter the United States, I’m doing the same.

May our people plant corn which was discovered in Colombia and feed the world.

Notes:

(1) Gutierrez, Gabe (2025): White House says Colombia agreed to Trump's deportation terms after tariff standoff. NBC News 01/26/2025. <https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/colombia-turns-away-deportation-flights-rcna189335> (Accessed: 2025-26-01).

See also: Dura represalia de Trump a Colombia por no aceptar su política antiinmigrante. Página/12 27.01.2025. <https://www.pagina12.com.ar/799669-dura-represalia-de-trump-a-colombia-por-no-aceptar-su-politi> (Accessed: 2025-26-01).

(2) https://x.com/petrogustavo/status/1883624818811236502. 01/26/2025. (Accessed: 2025-26-01).

(3) For a detailed historical account, see: LaFeber, Walter (1979): The Panama Canal: The Crisis in Historical Perspective. Expanded Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. <https://archive.org/details/panamacanalcr00lafe/page/n5/mode/2up> (Accessed: 2025-26-01).

(4) Trump slaps tariffs on Colombia in retaliation for refusing US deportation flights. FRANCE 24 YouTube channel 01/26/2025. <https://youtu.be/jjmmIZPDdlk?si=N9DLW_T5BvPDpwkV> (Accessed: 2025-26-01).

Venezuelan refugees in Colombia

Bloomberg Businessweek has a report on immigration, How Governments Use Immigration to Boost Their Economies 10/30/2019, that includes a section on refugees from Venezuela to Colombia:

Colombia, which shares a 1,400-mile border with Venezuela, has been hit hardest by the refugee crisis, receiving 1.6 million Venezuelan migrants, who now make up about 3% of the population, up from virtually none five years ago.

The Colombian government estimates it’s paid $1.5 billion - a figure equal to 0.5% of gross domestic product - to care for the exiles. A refugee fund set up by the World Bank, the United Nations, and the Islamic Development Bank approved a $31.5 million grant for Colombia in April. Meanwhile, international donors have pledged $340 million in humanitarian aid to help Venezuelan migrants in Colombia and elsewhere. However, those figures pale next to the more than $23 billion that countries and multilateral organizations committed to help Syrians fleeing their war-torn country in the first five years of the exodus, according to UN data. [my emphasis]

A significant number of refugees from Venezuela to Colombia are Colombians who had gone to live in Venezuela in more prosperous times when oil prices were high and boosting Venezuela's petrostate economy. But they are nevertheless part of a large influx of people who hadn't been living in Venezuela.

The Trump Administration is willing to impose sanctions to hammer the Venezuelan economy and undermine the current government of Nicolás Maduro, which it currently doesn't even recognize as the official government, although the "government" it does recognize there is largely a PR stunt.

But providing adequate assistance to Colombia to deal with the refugee problem to which the US has significantly contributed doesn't seem to be on the political radar screen of either party in the US.

But then, the Trump policy toward refugees in the US is appalling in so many ways, even criminally brutal.

It's also an important and valid criticism of the Obama Administration as well as Trump's that they were willing to take only a limited number of Syrian refugees from the Syrian civil war and also African refugees, many of which are now trying to make their way on the dangerousl refugee track to Europe after the destruction of the Libyan government by the US-French-British military intervention in 2011.

And thanks to the EU' own unwillingness to develop a realistic common policy for ansorbing refugees, refugee issues are now a growing contrast on EU and NATO foreign policy. Turkey currently is holding over three and a half million Syrian refugees and Turkey's willingness to hold them in exchange for payment from the EU was the kick-the-can-down-the-road "solution" to the immigration crisis of 2015-6 that Angela Merkel negotiated. The Syrian refugees are one motive for Turkey's current miltitary incursion into Syria.

The US and the EU have to get better of refugee problems more generally. And they need to take the lead in strangtening and expanding the United Nations' role, as well.

On the other hand, raising the need for (vaguely defined) longterm solutions to immigrantion/refugee issues is also used by xenophobic politicians as a deflection from discusinng more immediate problems. And if you can't be realistic and practical about the current problems, you're unlikely to be serious or realistic about longterm ones.