Member-only story

Trump’s Beef With Colombia Isn’t What You Think (It’s Dumber)

Colombian President Gustavo Petro had a simple request, Trump turned it into the stupidest international incident in a long time

Arturo Dominguez
7 min readJan 28, 2025
Photo by David Restrepo on Unsplash

On Sunday, news broke all over social media about Colombia denying military planes with deportees from landing in the country. While Colombia has regularly accepted flights from the United States, President Gustavo Petro turned them away for one simple reason: he asked that repatriated Colombians be treated humanely. He then offered his presidential plane to ensure their treatment was just. In response, the Trump administration turned it into one of the dumbest international incidents in recent history.

In the end, Petro got what he wanted.

On Monday, legacy media chose a narrative suggesting Colombia backed down from U.S. demands. However, that’s only partially true. Moving forward, repatriations to Colombia will be conducted just as Petro asked. Typically, repatriation flights are done using commercial aircraft, not military planes. As expected, when military planes show up unannounced in foreign airspace, it creates cause for concern, as we recently saw with flights to Mexico.

--

--

Arturo Dominguez
Arturo Dominguez

Written by Arturo Dominguez

Journalist covering Congress, Racial Justice, Human Rights, Cuba, Texas | Editor: The Antagonist Magazine |

Responses (2)