‘An important honor’: Key takeaways from Trump’s assembly with Colombia’s Petro – Worldwide Dispatch

For months, United States President Trump has known as him a “sick man” and an “unlawful drug chief”.

However on Tuesday, Trump welcomed his Colombian counterpart Gustavo Petro to the White Home for his or her first face-to-face assembly in Washington, DC.

Each leaders hailed the assembly as productive, whereas acknowledging the lingering tensions that divide them.

At a information convention after their assembly, Petro waved away questions on his rocky historical past with Trump, whom he has publicly accused of human rights violations.

As an alternative, he known as their interplay “ a gathering between two equals who’ve other ways of considering”.

“He didn’t change his manner of his considering. Neither did I. However how do you do an settlement, a pact? It’s not as between twin brothers. It’s between opponents,” Petro mentioned.

Individually, Trump advised reporters from the Oval Workplace that he felt good concerning the assembly. “I believed it was terrific,” he mentioned.

On the agenda for the 2 leaders have been points together with the combat towards transnational drug trafficking and safety in Latin America.

Listed below are 5 takeaways from Tuesday’s assembly.

A White Home appeal offensive

Over the previous yr, Trump has invited the media to take part in his conferences with international leaders, typically holding information conferences with the visiting dignitaries within the Oval Workplace.

Not this time, nevertheless. The assembly between Trump and Petro lasted almost two hours, all of it behind closed doorways.

However the two leaders emerged with largely constructive issues to say about each other.

In a put up on social media, Petro revealed that Trump had gifted him a number of gadgets, together with a commemorative picture of their assembly accompanied by a signed word.

“Gustavo — an ideal honor. I really like Colombia” it learn, adopted by Trump’s signature.

In one other put up, Petro confirmed off a signed copy of Trump’s e-book The Artwork of the Deal. On its title web page, Trump had scrawled one other word to Petro: “You’re nice.”

“Can somebody inform me what Trump mentioned on this dedication?” Petro wrote jokingly in Spanish on social media. “I don’t perceive a lot English.”

A turning level in a tense relationship?

Petro’s joke seemed to be a cheeky nod to his notoriously rocky relationship with Trump.

It was solely six days into Trump’s second time period — on January 26, 2025 — that he and Petro first started their feud, buying and selling threats on social media over the destiny of two US deportation flights.

Petro objected to reported human rights violations going through the deportees. Trump, in the meantime, took Petro’s preliminary refusal to simply accept the flights as a risk to US “nationwide safety”. Petro in the end backed down after Trump threatened steep sanctions on imported Colombian items.

However they’ve continued to commerce barbs within the months since. Petro, for example, has condemned the lethal US assaults on boats within the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, evaluating the strikes to homicide.

He has additionally criticised Trump for finishing up a US navy offensive in Venezuela to abduct then-President Nicolas Maduro. That assault, Petro mentioned, was tantamount to “kidnapping”.

Trump, in the meantime, stripped Petro of his US visa following the Colombian chief’s look on the United Nations Normal Meeting, the place he criticised the US and briefly joined a pro-Palestinian protest.

His administration has additionally sanctioned Petro in October, blaming the left-wing chief for permitting “drug cartels to flourish”.

After eradicating Maduro from energy on January 3, Trump supplied a warning to Petro: that he had higher “watch his a**”. That assertion was broadly interpreted to be a risk of navy motion towards Colombia.

Nonetheless, Trump and Petro seem to have reached a turning level final month. On January 7, the 2 leaders held their first name collectively. Tuesday’s in-person assembly marked one other first of their relationship.

Agreeing to disagree

Regardless of the easing tensions, Trump and Petro each used their public statements after their assembly to reaffirm their variations.

Trump was the primary to talk, holding a information convention within the Oval Workplace as he signed laws to finish a authorities shutdown.

The US president, a member of the right-wing Republican Get together, used the looks to replicate on the political tensions they’d within the lead-up to the assembly.

“He and I weren’t precisely the most effective of buddies, however I wasn’t insulted as a result of I’d by no means met him,” Trump advised reporters.

He added that Tuesday’s assembly was however nice. “I didn’t know him in any respect, and we acquired alongside very properly.”

Petro, in the meantime, held an extended information convention on the Colombian embassy in Washington, DC, the place he raised some factors of divergence he had with Trump.

Among the many subjects he talked about was Israel’s genocidal warfare in Gaza, which the US supported, and sustainable vitality initiatives designed to be carbon impartial. Trump, up to now, has known as so-called inexperienced vitality programmes a “rip-off”.

Petro, Colombia’s first left-wing chief, additionally mirrored on his area’s historical past with colonialism and international intervention. He advised reporters that it was essential that Latin America make selections for itself, free from any exterior “coercion”.

“ We don’t function underneath blackmail,” he mentioned at one level, in an obvious reference to Trump’s stress campaigns.

Differing strategy to drug manufacturing

One of many main factors of rivalry, nevertheless, was Petro’s strategy to combatting drug trafficking.

Colombia is the world’s largest producer of cocaine, liable for producing 68 % of the worldwide provide.

The Trump administration has used the combat towards international drug trafficking as justification for finishing up deadly navy strikes in worldwide waters and in Venezuela, regardless of consultants condemning the assaults as unlawful underneath worldwide legislation.

It has additionally stripped Colombia of its certification as an ally in its international counter-narcotics operations.

Trump’s White Home has mentioned it’ll contemplate reversing that call if Petro takes “extra aggressive motion to eradicate coca and cut back cocaine manufacturing and trafficking”.

However Petro has rejected any try and label him as mushy on drug trafficking, as a substitute touting the historic drug busts his authorities has overseen.

He made that argument but once more after Tuesday’s assembly, claiming that no different Colombian administration had executed as a lot as his to combat cocaine trafficking.

Quite than take a militarised strategy to destroying crops of coca — the uncooked ingredient for cocaine — Petro argued on Tuesday that he has had extra success with voluntary eradication programmes.

That push, he mentioned, succeeded in “getting 1000’s of peasant farmers to uproot the plant themselves”.

“These are two completely different strategies, two other ways of understanding how you can combat drug trafficking,” Petro mentioned. “One that’s brutal and self-interested, and what it finally ends up doing is selling mafia powers and drug traffickers, and one other strategy, which is clever, which is efficient.”

Petro maintained it was extra strategic to go after high drug-ring leaders than to punish impoverished rural farmers by forcibly ripping up their crops.

“I advised President Trump, if you would like an ally in combating drug trafficking, it’s going after the highest kingpins,” he mentioned.

A Trumpian word

Tuesday’s assembly in the end marked one more high-profile reversal for Trump, who has a historical past of shifting his relationships with different world leaders.

Final yr, for example, he lashed out at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a public Oval Workplace conflict, solely to heat to the war-time chief a number of months later.

However Colombia is shortly approaching a pivotal presidential election in Could, which can see Petro’s left-wing coalition, the Historic Pact, search to defend the presidency towards an ascendant far proper.

Petro himself can’t run for consecutive phrases underneath Colombian legislation. However there’s hypothesis that Tuesday’s detente with Trump might assist Petro’s coalition keep away from US condemnation forward of the vote.

Colombia, in spite of everything, was till not too long ago the biggest recipient of US support in South America, and it has lengthy harboured shut ties with the North American superpower. Straining these ties might due to this fact be seen as an election legal responsibility.

Whereas Petro acknowledged his variations with Trump throughout his remarks, at instances he expressed sure views that overlapped with the US president’s.

Like Trump has up to now, Petro used a part of his speech on Tuesday to query the position of the United Nations in sustaining international safety.

“ Did it not present incapacity? Isn’t a reform wanted?” Petro requested, questioning aloud if there was “one thing superior to the United Nations that may deliver humanity collectively higher in a greater manner”.

However when it got here to donning Trump’s signature “Make America Nice Once more” baseball cap, Petro drew a line — or fairly, a squiggle.

On social media, he shared an adjustment he made to the cap’s slogan. A jagged, Sharpie-inked “S” amended the phrase to incorporate to the whole Western Hemisphere: “Make Americas Nice Once more.”