Relations between the Trump administration and Colombia took their fourth flip for the more severe this yr over the weekend, after President Donald Trump threatened steep new tariffs on a free-trade companion and mentioned he would droop U.S. help and help to one in every of its key Latin American allies.
The punitive steps, introduced Sunday, got here after Colombian President Gustavo Petro once more criticized the continued and legally doubtful U.S. navy assaults on civilian small craft within the Caribbean, ostensibly a part of the Trump administration’s struggle on drug trafficking. Simply after Trump’s announcement, Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth introduced one other U.S. strike, this time on what he claimed was a ship crewed by Colombian guerrillas carrying narcotics.
Relations between the Trump administration and Colombia took their fourth flip for the more severe this yr over the weekend, after President Donald Trump threatened steep new tariffs on a free-trade companion and mentioned he would droop U.S. help and help to one in every of its key Latin American allies.
The punitive steps, introduced Sunday, got here after Colombian President Gustavo Petro once more criticized the continued and legally doubtful U.S. navy assaults on civilian small craft within the Caribbean, ostensibly a part of the Trump administration’s struggle on drug trafficking. Simply after Trump’s announcement, Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth introduced one other U.S. strike, this time on what he claimed was a ship crewed by Colombian guerrillas carrying narcotics.
“President Gustavo Petro, of Colombia, is an unlawful drug chief strongly encouraging the large manufacturing of medicine,” Trump wrote on his social media platform Sunday, vowing to chop off the trickle of U.S. help that also reaches the nation.
The issue is that reducing already-slashed ranges of U.S. improvement and counternarcotics help for Colombia will make it more durable for Bogotá to attain its personal targets of rural improvement that might present licit financial alternate options to mushrooming coca manufacturing. (Colombia is the supply of about 97 % of all of the cocaine in america, and the United Nations estimates the nation is producing near-record crops.) Traditionally, the most important chunk of U.S. help for Colombia has come within the type of counternarcotics and law-enforcement assist, adopted by improvement help and financial assist to assist diversify Colombia’s economic system.
“If the U.S. had been actually enthusiastic about countering drug trafficking, the very last thing you’d do is to alienate the one navy within the area” that has the aptitude to take the battle to the drug traffickers, mentioned Elizabeth Dickinson, the senior analyst for Colombia on the Worldwide Disaster Group. “It’s completely illogical.”
But it surely’s not even clear proper now how a lot U.S. help Trump could be freezing. The Biden administration had sought greater than $400 million for the nation for fiscal yr 2024, however Congress appropriated barely lower than that for each that yr and financial 2025, which simply concluded. However the Trump administration earlier this yr additionally slashed U.S. Company for Worldwide Growth funding, together with for Colombia. Estimates of U.S. help to Colombia this yr had been about one-quarter to one-half of the latest quantities, or between $100 million and $200 million or so.
In any occasion, it’s not the pure quantities that matter—as Dickinson mentioned, these will not be top-offs to the Colombian protection finances. Slightly, they’re long-term investments america has made at enhancing interoperability and the capabilities of the Colombian armed forces.
“It might destroy protection relationships, and depart the Colombian navy with out a whole lot of its performance. You’ll cripple a whole lot of what they should battle organized crime and medicines,” she mentioned.
The opposite punitive step taken by the Trump administration was to threaten further U.S. import duties on Colombia, a reprise of comparable threats made through the first weeks of Trump’s second time period, when Petro initially refused to simply accept U.S. deportation flights. It’s unclear underneath what authorized authority Trump might search to levy further tariffs on Colombia. It might not be underneath the nationwide safety exception, which in any occasion are for sector-specific tariffs, such because the metal and aluminum tariffs that already apply to Colombia—although Trump would possibly argue that drug flows represent a nationwide emergency (like persistent commerce deficits) that underpinned his international tariffs earlier this yr; his tariffs on Canada and Mexico for fentanyl commerce invoked that Carter-era laws. (All of Trump’s makes use of of financial emergencies to levy tariffs have been struck down by the courts; the Supreme Courtroom will hear the administration’s enchantment subsequent month.)
The stiffer new tariffs would come on prime of the present 10 % tariffs that just about all international locations on the planet face, although Colombia has a free-trade settlement with america. The USA is Colombia’s largest single buying and selling companion—the 2 international locations have bilateral commerce of about $55 billion a yr. That offers Trump’s tariffs some potential leverage, however the primary U.S. imports of Colombian items embrace oil, espresso, flowers, and cacao, which means the ache might be felt as a lot by U.S. shoppers as by Colombian exporters.
These measures, too, would fly within the face of each Colombian and U.S. efforts to foster different agricultural endeavors to coca cultivation.
“There may be nothing that competes with coca cultivation for small farmers besides espresso and cacao,” mentioned Dickinson, who famous that each may now face shrinking alternatives of their largest market.
After that early tariff battle, relations additional soured in September, when Trump “decertified” Colombia as a dependable U.S. companion on counternarcotics, the primary such decertification of Colombia in almost 30 years. The administration later introduced waivers that prevented most computerized help cuts, however these have now been suspended anyway. Suspending even diminished ranges of U.S. help, mentioned some advocacy teams such because the Washington Workplace on Latin America, would empower violent criminals and hurt harmless Colombians, perversely creating extra incentives to enter the drug commerce.
Tensions sank even additional in late September, when the Trump administration revoked Petro’s U.S. visa after he addressed the U.N. Normal Meeting and criticized U.S. strikes on small craft close to Colombia’s shores. Petro additionally notably angered the administration with remarks at a pro-Palestinian protest in New York the place he urged U.S. troops to disobey orders.
On Monday, Colombia mentioned it had recalled its ambassador to america in response to the most recent escalation.
Petro took workplace in 2022 as the pinnacle of Colombia’s first trendy left-wing authorities, and sought to reverse many years of “pressured eradication,” a controversial program meant to attenuate acreage devoted to coca cultivation. The decline in eradication measures coincided with an increase in coca cultivation in Colombia, some extent the Trump administration underscored in its September choice to decertify the nation as a dependable counternarcotics companion. However the Petro authorities is presently embroiled in a battle with narco-traffickers in rural areas of the nation, essentially the most intense in a decade, and a fall in U.S. help will exacerbate an already dire safety scenario.
The decline in U.S.-Colombian relations is particularly noteworthy for a significant non-NATO U.S. ally, and at a time of heightened regional pressure, as america has positioned about 10,000 troops and a number of warships and plane within the Caribbean, and made threatening overtures towards the Venezuelan regime of Nicolás Maduro.
“What this grandstanding has been doing is throw all these ties out the window, throw many years of cooperation and funding away,” Dickinson mentioned. If the most recent measures will not be walked again, she mentioned, they may “have a dramatic fallout.”
