MIAMI – Two U.S. Air Force cargo planes with deportees prompted a brief crisis Sunday between Colombia and the U.S.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro took to X and President Donald Trump to Truth Social.
After hours of threats, there was a deal. Colombia agreed to receive the deportees.
“It is not about whether Trump or Petro won, here both countries won and diplomacy won,” Daniel García Peña, the Colombian ambassador to the U.S., told Colombian Radio W on Monday morning in Spanish.
As part of the new agreement, a Colombian plane was flying Monday afternoon to San Diego, California on a mission to pick up over 150 deportees, El Tiempo newspaper reported.
Trump, who was in Doral Sunday, and Marco Rubio, the new secretary of state, counted on Mauricio Claver-Carone, the new special envoy for Latin America.
The White House released a statement misspelling Colombia as “Columbia” and later announced that Petro had yielded under the threat of tariffs.
“Today’s events make clear to the world that America is respected again,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote in a statement.
Petro, an economist with experience as a congressman and mayor, is a former member of the M-19, a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla in Colombia.
During tensions Sunday on social media that included threats of raising tariffs, Petro wrote a long statement to Trump accusing him of racism.
“Maybe one day, over a drink of Whiskey, which 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,” Petro wrote on X.
In 2022, Petro was inaugurated as Colombia’s first leftist president in decades. During his presidency, he has released statements praising Fidel and Raul Castro.
“The Castros took care that the children had food, health and education,” Petro wrote in Spanish on 2023 on X to the dismay of Cuban Americans in Miami.
Petro leads the Pacto Histórico, a coalition of Colombian leftist political parties that include communists and former guerrillas supported by Castro.
Rubio and Claver-Carone were both born in Miami-Dade County to Cuban parents who opposed the Castros. The U.S. embassy in Colombia briefly suspended visas.
Trump’s threats on hold include 25% tariffs to go up to 50% in a week. a travel ban, visa revocations, and a list of treasury sanctions.