it is wild to think that in this day and age two heads of state could get into a grudge match on social media of all things that would put an entire economic relationship billions of dollars in trade at risk but it happened meet Gustavo Petro president of Colombia this guy you already know Pro was Furious about this Colombian migrants Shackled and marched onto a military plane deported from the US sent back to Colombia so he posts on X at like 3:30 in the morning local time the US cannot treat Colombian migrants as criminals I deny
the entry of American planes carrying Colombian migrants into our territory Trump fires back on Truth social threatening tariffs up to 50% on all Colombian Goods we will not allow the Colombian government to violate its legal obligations with regard to the acceptance and return of the criminals they forced into the United States to which Petro replies amid a big wall of text I don't shake hands with white slavers overthrow me and the Americas and Humanity will respond and at this point it's like whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa what on Earth is going on who's getting overthrown
how does the prospect of a full-blown trade War get conjured out of thin air between Donald Trump and Colombia and it's only Sunday president Trump's Whirlwind first week is ending with another bang a potential trade war between Colombia and the United States is averted over the weekend this extraordinary public spat may be a preview of how Trump will use tariffs as a weapon but what we would very quickly learn is that while these two presidents were arguing and threatening and escalating the situation right up to the brink of an actual trade War their staffers were
feverishly working behind the scenes to defuse the situation to undo the damage that these two men were doing to their relationship in real time thankfully it was resolved by active work on the on the part of Colombian and US diplomats um not tweeting back and forth but actually talking to one another because within 24 hours official word would come out that the two sides had settled everything as if to say everybody stand down it's all good don't put tariffs on anything we've reached a deal everybody just we're all good so what happened why did this
fight really break out and who came out on top so I think what we saw unfold in a flurry of social media posts on a Sunday we can explain on two different levels there's the surface level which is is about events and actions and reactions then there's a deeper level which is about the people involved and their relationships with each other the surface level is easier to understand so we'll start there that photo appears to be what started all of this Donald Trump has long promised to carry out the largest deportation operation in history if
elected and this plain load of migrants was actually one of two heading for Columbia but what got a little bit lost I think is that according to the US Colombia had already agreed to accept its people back from The American Secretary of State Colombian president Petro had authorized flights and provided all needed authorizations and then canceled his authorization when the planes were in the air but again it goes back to that photo at 9:30 in the morning Colombia's president posts on X a migrant is not a criminal and must be treated with the dignity that
a human being deserv reserves that's why I turned back the US military planes that were carrying Colombian migrants we will receive our fellow citizens on civilian planes without treating them like criminals and he ratchets things up one notch further because he then points out again on social media there are more than 15,000 illegal Americans in Colombia right now what about them you will never see me burning a US flag or carrying out a raid to return hand uncuffed illegal immigrants to the US true Libertarians will never attack human Freedom we are the opposite of the
nais so now the temperature's going up right an hour and a half later Donald Trump hops on Truth social and types this Petro's denial of these flights has jeopardized the National Security and Public Safety of the United States and then he lays out his threats emergency 25% tariffs on all Goods coming into the US and then in one week the 25% tariffs will be raised to 50% and the list goes on travel bans for Columbian officials Visa sanctions on members of government a Crackdown on Colombian Travelers with stricter inspections all on the grounds of what
Trump calls National Security oh and he adds this these measures are just the beginning because of the asymmetries between the two economies of course the United States can impose uh for a short-term uh tariffs on the imports from Colombia and this is going to be devastating yes a trade War would be fairly one-sided the US is Colombia's largest trading partner generating about $ 33 billion dollar in two-way trade last year and that split almost 50/50 between them the US gets about a quarter of its coffee from Colombia that alone is worth about $2 billion a
year the US also Imports bananas avocado autos and fresh cut flowers nearly 2third of all cut flowers coming into the US are also from Colombia but from Colombia's point of view exports to the US make up about a quarter of all their exports I mean we're talking about sectors that employ hundreds of thousands of people they would have just been destroyed by a 25% tariff on their goods right because who's going to want to pay 25% more to import Colombian flour if you can get a supplier in Ecuador or in a competing country you know
but none of this seems to give Gustavo Pro any pause he posts yet another message on X calling the US boring telling Trump his greed will wipe out the human race mentioning arrogance torture slavery yellow butterflies slavery again libertarianism Co and that's just in the first half of the post president Pro is not known for his diplomatic skills and he picked a fight in the middle of the night that could have had quite disastrous con uh consequences for Colombia because ultimately Petro tells Trump you will never rule us I will never allow Colombians to be
brought in handcuffs on flights I am a man of Freedom not of chains Pro sees himself in great Rio terms as standing up to the Empire as standing up for Latin American dignity and the Dignity of of uh the Colombian people and he threatened a 25% tariff on American Goods also potentially escalating to 50% but then as suddenly as this all started a resolution negotiated far away from the global stage of social media these are people who understand the importance of the US Colombian relationship and irrespective of the behavior of the communications of their bosses
were looking to try to get things to a uh a a peaceful resolution except at the highest level both sides appeared to claim victory a White House statement said Colombia had agreed to all of Trump's terms including unrestricted acceptance of all illegal aliens from Colombia returned from the United States including on US military aircraft without limitation or delay but according to the Colombian ambassador to the US it was actually Colombia's own plan planes that were scheduled to pick up those migrants the following day suggesting US military planes would not be used for that particular trip
which appears to be in line with what Petro demanded in the first place still according to one Us official cited by Bloomberg the Trump Administration still plans on an as-needed basis to use military flights to deport people to Colombia though they mention one silver lining if Colombia does indeed provide its own planes in the future the use of Colombian planes saves American taxpayers the cost of those military flights and freeze up US aircraft to help with deportations to other countries win-win for the United States it seems but let's dig one level [Music] deeper the slightly
less often told version of this story isn't really about late night tweets and knee-jerk reactions because deportations themselves are not new Joe Biden deported hundreds of thousands of migrants last fiscal year and over the course of his administration 28,6 35 of them were Colombian citizens last year alone 124 us planes carrying deported migrants landed in Colombia but I think in this case what really made a difference was that it was US military flights and I think for you know Petro who is somebody who used to be part of a left wi Rebel group who has
this ideology against us imperialism this sort of like set set off his nerves I think that there's um a big piece of him that is perfectly happy to pick a fight with the United States with Donald Trump um over issues of um ideology and and ego ideology because Gustavo Petro is quite widely described as leftwing social spending progressive taxation Environmental Protection this is what he fights for but even during the Biden Administration there was a growing Rift of policy differences between the two countries he was taking out positions that were very much uh um not
aligned with us interests take cocaine for example Colombia is Far and Away the world's most significant provider of cocaine maybe up to 80% of the world's cocaine comes from there the US DEA figures hundreds of millions of dollars worth a week it's a major export and a big part of the economy but at the UN Petro railed against the US saying the so-called War on Drugs was a failure and that the world's Reliance on oil kills far more people than any drug this is important because for nearly a quarter Century the US and Colombia have
been steady Partners economically and from a security standpoint against transnational crime and especially drug trafficking but the two countries have adopted increasingly differing takes on how hard a line to take against an industry that is either lucrative or dangerous depending on how you look at it now you have a new US president who is uh even more ideologically different from president Petro than president uh Biden was and I think that president pro is using this as an opportunity to come out um uh swinging swinging perhaps because layered on top of everything I've just mentioned Pro
is deeply unpopular his approval rating has hovered in the low 30s a big dip from where he started when he was elected only about two and a half years ago Colombus has been going through a very tough time with violence increasing in some parts of the country and you know picking a fight with the United States definitely draws attention away from the domestic problems that Colombia is currently facing ultimately I'll level with you this whole episode is kind of difficult to explain as the rational actions of two world leaders and it's tempting to look at
what happened this epic explosive fight between Trump and pro as kind of flash in the pan after all it was over and done with as quickly as it started but if Colombia had any hope of improving relations with the US with a new US president taking office things are off to a rocky start and what about Trump making an example of pro the way he did the White House's position is that today's events make clear to the world that America is respected again but is that really the case does this motivate America's allies to fall
in line or does it only gradually risk pushing them away [Music]
