In the serious and very risky situation that we are experiencing today with Donald Trump, two versions of Gustavo Petro have been exposed. The first is that of a ruler who suffers from Nero syndrome, the emperor accused of setting fire to Rome and who became immortalized in history as an example that power and megalomania consume rulers.
That is what former President Iván Duque thinks, for example, who claims that Petro is seeking the debacle of relations with the United States, because"having no legacy, he wants to see everything burned down: diplomatic relations, trade, security, access to financing. He wants to play the victim and use this as a factor of polarization in the face of the 2026 election."
But there is another Petro: the version he believes he believes in himself. He outlined it in Ibagué when he asserted that"the world no longer knows Colombia for Pablo Escobar, now they know it for Petro." And he reiterated it without blushing this Monday in an interview with Daniel Coronell."I will become unforgettable; many men want to be that way, and sometimes we can't," he said in the same interview, which once again sparked the ire of the White House."Humanity has a first way out, and that is to change Trump, in various ways; it may be through Trump himself, the easiest. If not, get rid of Trump," he warned.
Both versions of the Colombian president have the country mired in the worst moment of relations between the two countries, with a government decertified in the fight against drugs and its president without a visa and on the Clinton List. And"with little chance of improvement," as Juan Cruz, former advisor for the Western Hemisphere to Trump during his first term, warns SEMANA.
Petro, feeling he could embody the biblical character of David and defeat Goliath, opened a battlefront with dire repercussions in an unequal struggle against the world's most powerful country. A battle of arrows versus missiles in which he believes he will win big, but Colombia will lose enormously."The consequences for the country are much more complicated and acute than the consequences for the United States," says Brian Nichols, Biden's former assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere.
Given this situation, former President Duque warns, there is only one way out. “Effective parallel diplomacy is needed from all of us who have built and valued the relationship with the United States to prevent this from becoming a tragedy. The government may change in 2026, but it will take time to restore everything Petro has destroyed, and we must prevent further destruction.”
How did it get to this point? Petro's verbal harassment of Trump not only infuriates the White House leader, but is also useful and exemplary today. It's difficult to understand the implications of the critical and dangerous moment Colombia is experiencing vis-à-vis the United States without framing it within the planetary system revolving around the sun that the Republican has become.
Trump is today the definitive figure in the planet's major wars and problems."I want to try to reach heaven if possible," he said recently. He might have merits for it, according to experts: Hamas had to seal an agreement with Israel and return the kidnapped victims, and pressure from the White House is on the verge of achieving something similar in the war between Russia and Ukraine. His third international battlefront is the one that carries the most weight in the United States: the relentless war on drugs. Only there has Trump intervened militarily and has even bombed abroad. Having Maduro in power was already a mouthful, a perfect enemy: a despot, a violator of human rights, a persecutor of the opposition, head of the so-called Cartel of the Suns, a criminal with a bounty of $50 million on him, higher than the one on Osama bin Laden.
But if Petro doesn't show his face, the military deployment in the Caribbean could have been interpreted as a controversial way for the United States to pressure Maduro to leave power. Or, as the Colombian president put it, a"fictitious excuse for the far right to overthrow governments that don't obey them."
But then Petro arrived with a series of actions that seemed designed to unleash hell: returning the migrant planes, denying extraditions, accusing him of being a"genocidal" and a "Nazi," asking the US military to revolt, and suggesting Trump's sudden departure from power. And that military deployment now has a new setting: Colombia. This is the magnitude of the turn taken by the already dire tension between Petro and Trump.
This week, the United States made three very serious elements clear. The first is that they are behind the campaign financing and other money-related matters. This theory was confirmed with the inclusion of the president; his wife, Verónica Alcocer; his son Nicolás; and his Interior Minister, Armando Benedetti, on the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) list, known as the Clinton List.
Earlier this week, former U.S. Treasury Undersecretary Marshall Billingslea had said in the Senate that Venezuela"has fueled the socialist plague that has spread throughout Latin America" and that "that corrupt and dirty Venezuelan money is what financed Petro's campaign." Republican Senator Bernie Moreno later reiterated this: "What we have in Colombia is a president who was elected with the help of drug cartels." Second, Trump's thesis that Petro is the"leader" of the drug trade. The U.S. president was emphatic in not labeling him a kingpin, on the level of Maduro, but he did attribute responsibility to him through omission or collusion.
“They have a terrible leader there right now, a bad guy, a thug… they're producing cocaine at levels never seen before. They're not going to get away with this much longer. We're not going to last much longer,” he said Thursday. Days earlier, when suspending aid to the country, Trump had pointed out that drug trafficking had become “Colombia's biggest business” and that “Petro is doing nothing to stop it.” Hence the decertification.
On Friday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent asserted that"President Petro has allowed drug cartels to thrive and has refused to halt this activity. The numbers back him up: with 253,000 hectares under cultivation, the country produces 67 percent of the world's coca leaf."
"A president of the United States doesn't come out and say that a president is a drug kingpin without proof. That's why I say this smells like an indictment," says former President Andrés Pastrana, who adds that we mustn't forget that this week, U.S. Congresswoman María Elvira Salazar claimed that Pollo Carvajal, a central figure in the Chavista regime, testified in court that PDVSA financed Petro.
Added to this is a third element that makes things worse: the policies of President Petro, whose visa to enter the United States was revoked, would confirm Trump's thesis.
The "total peace" policy, the so-called Pact of La Picota, the"trial detention" of prisoners in La Alpujarra, and the refusal to extradite drug traffickers contextualize the United States' evident discontent with the crime situation. The Court's ban on fumigation, coupled with the failure of forced eradication, which, according to Defense Ministry figures, plummeted from 103,290 hectares in 2021 to 9,402 last year, offers no hope.
In Washington this week, a decisive event also occurred: Trump formally declared that the United States is waging an armed conflict against drug cartels. He did so in a notice he sent to Congress, a legal justification for his deployment in the Caribbean, under which he has bombed vessels and killed around 20 people."In an armed conflict, as defined by international law, a country may legally kill enemy combatants, even when they pose no threat, detain them indefinitely without trial, and prosecute them in military tribunals," explained The New York Times, which revealed the document. Thus, it became clear that Trump is not resorting to the controversial preemptive self-defense approach—which Bush used in Iraq—but rather to attack.
The Republican president reiterated this on Thursday at the White House: “I don’t think we’re necessarily going to ask for a declaration of war. I think we’re just going to kill the people who bring drugs into our country.” He then added: “Land will be the next step.”
“Trump has a great deal of public support for the war against the cartels. Bombing foreign territory, especially in Latin America, something that once seemed unthinkable, is now a mainstream idea for the Republican Party,” says Brian Winter, editor of the prestigious publication Americas Quarterly. Eddy Acevedo, of the Wilson Center, explains that with this declaration, Trump “will treat cartel members as unlawful combatants” and will help him “deploy all the instruments available.”
The United States now sees itself as a James Bond "with a license to kill." Trump asserted that "it should now be clear to everyone that the cartels are the ISIS of the Western Hemisphere." So far, only one Colombian group has been mentioned: the ELN.
"For the American government, the ELN is an international terrorist organization with security implications for the United States due to its role in drug trafficking. Its actions in the Pacific demonstrate that Colombia is the problem today, because it has no border with Venezuela," explains former prosecutor Francisco Barbosa.
U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth confirmed that the ship shot down a few days ago was affiliated with that organization."They will be hunted down and annihilated, just like al-Qaeda," he said. On Friday, the White House ordered the deployment of the Gerald R. Ford, the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier considered the largest in the world.
If the ELN is like al-Qaeda and the United States claims it would attack on the ground, what could happen? Michael Shifter, a senior fellow at the Inter-American Dialogue, asserts that"the use of armed conflict as a legal framework would allow the United States to act with greater room for maneuver," but adds that "it's unclear how far the United States is willing to go in this military shift."
Winter is also skeptical. “I could be wrong, but I don't think it will happen,” he says. “There is a frontal attack from the United States government saying: if you don't attack, we will,” adds former President Pastrana.
Petro must be aware that Colombia is merely a pawn, or at most, a knight on this chessboard, but he has managed to turn the situation around to wave his own flag. For Petro, Trump is a more than perfect adversary. Opposing the empire is part of the core of the insurgency in which Petro fought decades ago.
Today, anti-imperialism stirs emotions, but not the same ones it once did. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War,"Yankees, go home" graffiti is a thing of the past. Many Colombians aren't Trump fans, but they are enemies of confrontation with the United States.
The fight also coincided with what has been one of the biggest political defeats for the left: the acquittal of former President Álvaro Uribe. In his tweet rejecting that decision, Petro also declared himself persecuted by Trump,"allied with Uribe."
He said they are seeking to sanction him and stage a coup d'état. It was on that day that the president called for a meeting in Bolívar Square to instigate the Constituent Assembly: "It's not Trump who defines, it's the people." The meeting coincided with his entry into the Clinton List, and, as expected, Petro lashed out at Trump."We don't kneel," he said before launching dozens of diatribes against the North American leader. But then he made a statement he won't keep:"It's not just about talking about Trump. We will not talk about him again in this government."
As Juan Cruz warns,"It's convenient for President Petro to find excuses for everything bad that may be happening in Colombia, with its economy and everything else... Trump gives him a way out." Juan González, former director for Latin America at the White House National Security Council, asserts that President Trump is wrong to give a platform to Petro, who is very"unpopular," and that what he perhaps seeks is to be, like the former president,"a leader of the global south in opposition to the United States."
Adding a constituent assembly to this battle cry is a brilliant electoral strategy, but it may not go any further. Petro lacks the votes in Congress or the time to approve a constituent assembly before the end of his term.
As former registrar Juan Carlos Galindo explains, the president, instead of directly presenting the constituent assembly, chose a longer route and opted for a popular call.
“Now, you must register a sponsoring committee with the Registry and then begin collecting signatures. Five percent of the electoral roll is needed, that is, 2 million signatures. If these are valid, the Registry will call for an electoral process so that the people can decide whether they want this legislative initiative to be presented. This cannot coincide with another election. Due to timing and process, I don't see this possible before the second half of 2026.”
After this vote, a bill must be processed, approved by an absolute majority in both chambers, and then reviewed by the Constitutional Court solely for procedural flaws."It's a sham, a smokescreen, to hide the country's problems and to play politics for 2026," Galindo maintains.
The Constituent Assembly will make the upcoming congressional elections more important than ever and will be a major mobilizer for left-wing slates. But it is not clear that the Petrismo will achieve a majority in March. The Constituent Assembly is wrapped in a highly popular populist language. Before leaving the Casa de Nariño, the then Minister of Justice, Eduardo Montealegre, presented the proposal to the social sectors as a"starting point" with surprising terminology: he spoke of the "cavern," of "imperial impositions," of "foreign humiliations," of "warlords." The project leaves several messages in the air, such as that it seeks to create a permanent state of emergency. It is explicit that it will have"the authority to reform the entire Constitution" to "rethink the institutional model."
There is also the fear that the executive branch will seek to reform the judiciary at will. He mentions, for example, the need to reform the Council of State and leaves open the possibility of the president intervening in the economy. But he clarifies that"he will not be able to recall Congress."
Faced with this maelstrom of events and circumstances, many voices are calling for unity and common sense. “The Colombian government's self-induced crisis with the United States demands the activation of all channels—formal and informal—of dialogue and negotiation with Washington. The private and academic sectors are called upon to play a fundamental role in providing the necessary short-term damage control, as well as protecting the Colombian social and business fabric. Starting in August 2026, the country must recover its alliance with this strategic partner,” says Andrés Rugeles, vice president of the Council on International Relations (Cori).
Former Foreign Minister Julio Londoño recalls that the desire to be unforgettable has motivated many men, from the time of Julius Caesar, through the great Houdini in London at the beginning of the 20th century, to the Canadian tightrope walker Harry Warner, who crossed the Tequendama Falls on a tightrope in 1895. The difference is that Warner walked alone with a rod in his hands and didn't carry an entire nation on his shoulders.
