President Trump recently called Colombia\u2019s leader, Gustavo Petro, a \u201csick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n
Petro, meanwhile, has labeled Trump a murderer and compared him to Adolf Hitler. <\/p>\n
But on Tuesday, the two leaders made nice \u2014 mostly \u2014 in a closed-door meeting at the White House that both described as productive. <\/p>\n
Trump described the two-hour conversation, which touched on energy, Venezuela and bilateral efforts to combat drug trafficking, as \u201cfantastic.\u201d<\/p>\n
Petro, in turn, called the confab \u201cvery positive\u201d and said it had an \u201coptimistic and constructive tone.\u201d<\/p>\n
He brought Trump Colombian coffee, and First Lady Melania Trump a gown crafted by Indigenous artisans. <\/p>\n
Trump gifted him a framed portrait of the two men shaking hands, scrawled with the words: \u201cI love Colombia.\u201d<\/p>\n
The meeting did not erase the considerable political differences between Trump, who believes the U.S. should dominate the Western Hemisphere, and Petro, a former left-wing guerrilla who opposed the recent U.S. operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro. <\/p>\n
Yet it did appeared to ease tensions between Colombia and the United States, longtime allies whose relationship soured over the last year amid public clashes between Trump and Petro. <\/p>\n
Relations between the nations grew tense shortly after Trump returned to the White House for a second term.<\/p>\n
Petro refused to receive U.S. military flights of deported migrants, acquiescing only after Trump threatened heavy tariffs on Colombian goods. <\/p>\n
After Petro gave a speech at the United Nations General Assembly slamming U.S. support for Israel and calling on American troops to disobey Trump and \u201cobey the orders of humanity,\u201d the State Department announced it was revoking the visa of Petro and several of his family members.<\/p>\n
In the fall, Trump accused Petro of failing to stop cocaine production \u2014 and of being a drug trafficker. <\/p>\n
Washington removed Colombia\u2019s certification that it is doing enough to eliminate cocaine crops and halted aid to the nation, which in 2023 surpassed $740 million. The Colombian government recalled its ambassador to the United States.<\/p>\n
Tensions peaked after the U.S. bombed Caracas and captured Maduro last month. <\/p>\n
Petro said the U.S. had \u201ckidnapped\u201d Maduro and dared Trump to launch a similar strike in Colombia. \u201cCome get me. I\u2019m waiting for you here,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n
Trump did not discard the possibility of a U.S. military operation in Colombia, saying, \u201cIt sounds good to me.\u201d <\/p>\n
Relations thawed with a Jan. 7 phone call between the leaders, in which they agreed to meet in person. The U.S. granted Petro a temporary visa so that he could visit the White House. <\/p>\n
Colombian officials said Petro planned to focus on defending his record in deterring drug trafficking, even though cocaine production is rising in Colombia. Acting Justice Minister Andr\u00e9s Id\u00e1rraga Franco recently said that Petro\u2019s administration has extradited more criminals to the United States than any of his conservative predecessors, including one accused trafficker who was delivered to U.S. authorities this week. <\/p>\n
Reporters are typically allowed into the Oval Office to ask questions of ahead of meetings between Trump and other heads of state, but they were not on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Although Trump praised the meeting as productive, he tempered his praise.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou know, he and I weren\u2019t exactly the best of friends,\u201d Trump said. \u201cBut I wasn\u2019t insulted because I\u2019d never met him. I didn\u2019t know him at all. And we got along very well.\u201d<\/p>\n
Speaking to journalists at the Colombian Embassy in Washington after the meeting, Petro mentioned climate change and criticized the U.S. operation in Venezuela and what he described as the \u201cgenocide\u201d in Gaza.<\/p>\n
He said Trump gave him one of his trademark red ball caps. He said he took a pen to change Trump\u2019s slogan, so that it now reads: \u201cMake Americas Great Again.\u201d <\/p>\n
Times staff writer Ana Ceballos in Washington contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"President Trump recently called Colombia\u2019s leader, Gustavo Petro, a \u201csick man who likes making cocaine and selling it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":163345,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[68697,79093,8179,48,52,51,23151,47,50,49,24145,79091,79092,8853,1519,2281,435,558,2805,72],"class_list":["post-163344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-closed-door-meeting","tag-cocaine-production","tag-colombia","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-leader","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-petro","tag-recent-u-s-operation","tag-sick-man","tag-tension","tag-trump","tag-u-s","tag-united-states","tag-washington","tag-white-house","tag-year"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163344"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163344\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/163345"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}