The US has said it will revoke Colombian President Gustavo Petro’s visa, after he urged US soldiers to disobey his American counterpart Donald Trump during remarks at a rally in New York.
The State Department described Petro’s comments at a pro-Palestinian street protest on Friday as “reckless and incendiary”.
The Colombian leader was in the US for the UN General Assembly, where earlier this week he called for a criminal inquiry into the Trump administration’s airstrikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean.
He was already on his way back to Bogota when the US announced it would cancel his visa, Colombian media reports.
Petro shared a video on social media of him addressing a large crowd through a megaphone in Spanish on Friday.
He called for the formation of a “world salvation army, whose first task is to liberate Palestine”.
“That is why, from here in New York, I ask all soldiers in the United States Army not to point their rifles at humanity,” he said. “Disobey Trump’s order! Obey the order of humanity!”
Petro added: “As happened in the First World War, I want the young people, sons and daughters of workers and farmers, of both Israel and the United States, to point their rifles not toward humanity, but toward the tyrants and toward the fascists.”
The US State Department strongly criticised the remarks, saying he had “urged US soldiers to disobey orders and incite violence”.
It wrote on social media that the revocation of his visa was “due to his reckless and incendiary actions”.
Colombia’s Interior Minister Armando Benedetti wrote on X on Friday night that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visa should have been annulled rather than Petro’s.
“But since the empire protects him, it’s taking it out on the only president who was capable enough to tell him the truth to his face,” he said.
Relations between Petro – who leads Colombia’s first ever left-wing government – and the Trump administration have worsened in recent months.
The Colombian leader used his speech at the UN to launch an excoriating rebuke of US strikes on boats suspected of being used to transport drugs, arguing they were not about controlling the drug trade but serving a need to use “violence to dominate Colombia and Latin America”.
He said some of those killed by the strikes may have been from Colombia, which is the world’s biggest cocaine producer, and claimed US officials were allied to drug gangs while his government was persuading farmers to not grow coca.
Petro likened the air strikes to an “act of tyranny” in an interview with the BBC.
Washington contends the actions are part of a US anti-drug operation off the coast of Venezuela, whose president it accuses of running a cartel.
The US also denied visas for Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, and 80 Palestinian officials, blocking them from attending the UN General Assembly, despite world leaders conventionally being permitted to attend the body’s headquarters regardless of their relations with the US. (BBC News)
