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Colombian President Gustavo Petro and his American counterpart haven’t been the closest of friends of late, to say the least.
But U.S. President Donald Trump changed his tune on the leftist leader after the two met at the White House in early February, trading accusations that Mr. Petro enabled drug traffickers for an assertion many didn’t see coming just weeks ago:
“You are great,” Mr. Trump reportedly wrote in an inscription in a signed copy of “The Art of the Deal” that he gave to Mr. Petro in the Oval Office.
But achieving that face-to-face meeting, and moving past the barbs and threats traded on social media, was by no means a given, said Daniel Garcia-Peña Jaramillo, ambassador of Colombia to the U.S., during a recent lecture at Georgia Tech.
Flipping the script required deft interpersonal maneuvering with some unlikely intermediaries, and faith from both sides that face-to-face dialogue could help defuse tensions, the ambassador told Global Atlanta in an interview.
Part of the equation was the heightened urgency Colombia faced in dealings with its long-time military ally. The operation to capture Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro on Jan. 3, he suggested “Colombia could be next,” prompting concern in Bogota, where Mr. Petro had been a vocal critic of the U.S. president’s strikes on boats allegedly running drugs in the Caribbean and Pacific.
U.S. Sen. Rand Paul admired Mr. Petro’s stance on that issue, Mr. Garcia-Peña said, and suggested to the ambassador that a call between the two presidents could help lower the temperature by helping Mr. Trump understand Colombia’s role in fighting drug-trafficking, with U.S. help, within its own borders over many years.
“He insisted, ‘You know, we just need to get our presidents to talk,’” the ambassador said. The senator made some telephone intros, “and the call happened that afternoon, so it was really very key that he was able to to make that call directly.”
Mr. Garcia-Peña said the Colombian government had been sending letters requesting such a meeting to no avail. While the ambassador never expected an invasion by the U.S., the boldness of Mr. Trump’s move next door in Venezuela put Colombians on edge.
“Trump does things that are unpredictable, so there was a lot of nervousness in the country,” he said.
That all evaporated when the two presidents concluded their meeting by exchanging gifts and shaking hands, a gesture that reassured many back home — and made Sen. Paul and unlikely hero across Colombia, Mr. Garcia-Peña said.
“At the end of the day, what matters is how in two countries that have built over 200 years this close relationship, the people-to-people relationship, that what really matters,” Mr. Garcia-Pena told the Georgia Tech students and stakeholders in a wide-ranging lecture. “For me, the most satisfactory moment was not only to see the smile on our two presidents faces, but how this is received in Colombia, how people are just relieved, are happy that the tension, the prospect of Colombia being bombed like Venezuela, had been left behind.”
That the misunderstandings had gone that far in the first place, however, had to do with an outdated view of the way drugs move, the ambassador told Global Atlanta.
While it’s true that coca production is still a problem in Colombia, the top-down strategy of attacking kingpins urged by Mr. Trump underestimates the interconnected and transnational nature of the problem, the ambassador said.
Many of the largest cartels have been largely dismantled within Colombia, transforming cities like Medellin and Cali from no-go zones in the 1990s to models of urban innovation. But even smaller traffickers are tied in with global networks, which means that tackling the problem involves sharing resources and intelligence across borders.
Mr. Garcia-Pena said that while Colombia doesn’t produce fentanyl, the intelligence gathering within Colombia about traffickers that work with the Mexican cartels has been valuable to the U.S.
Mr. Trump perked up when hearing about that during the meeting with Mr. Petro, the ambassador said, and the American president understood “right off the bat” the link between economic inclusion in Colombia’s rural areas and disincentivizing growing activities in the far-flung areas of the large country that are still controlled by traffickers.
“People focus just on one and they tend to forget about the other,” Mr. Garcia-Peña said, highlighting Mr. Petro’s push with American confectioners to trade coca for cacao.
The ambassador, a former professor and newspaper columnist, said he has also done a bit of work educating Mr. Petro, a former guerrilla fighter, about the U.S.
Some 20 years ago, Mr. Garcia-Peña gave Mr. Petro a copy of Howard Zinn‘s “A People’s History of the United States,” first published in 1980.
The goal was to show Mr. Petro that while U.S. interventions had often gone wrong in Latin America, the country was still capable of great things, giving the world the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement and the labor movement.
The tome struck a nerve with Mr. Petro, and his memory of it may have played a role in his appointment of Mr. Garcia-Peña as ambassador.
Growing Colombia’s Georgia Investment Ties
Georgia is also helping tell Colombia’s story, the ambassador said, given how the likes Delta Air Lines and Coca-Cola Co., the latter of which hosted Mr. Garcia-Peña on this trip, often attest to the country’s transformation.
“I have not yet met a person from America who has gone to Colombia and hasn’t come back favorably surprised,” Mr. Garcia-Peña said.
Admittedly, that might be because of outdated expectations and ongoing criticisms by Mr. Petro’s opponents that his policies would turn Colombia into “the next Venezuela.”
The ambassador said those fears have not materialized and that many of the economic indicators, including the strength of Colombia’s peso against the dollar, show its resiliency.
American firms have been the country’s “best ambassadors,” he added.
“Very important American companies that operate in Colombia have been able to help send a message to those in power in Washington how, on the contrary, Colombia is really, for many reasons, one of the best places to invest right now,” he said.
The ambassador also noted the importance of a longstanding free-trade agreement in steadying trade relations as the U.S. violates, in his view, its obligations to the deal by imposing undue tariffs.
Still, about two-thirds of Colombian exports enter the U.S. tariff-free, with carveouts for certain products that reveal the complementarity of the two economies. He pointed to coffee, which is not widely grown in the U.S., and where every dollar of imports from Colombia creates $30 of value addition here.
During a previous trip, the ambassador met with Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who expressed interest in Colombia, where the state maintains a trade and investment office.
And Colombian companies like Argos, the cement giant acquired by Summit Materials in 2023, have contributed to the vibrancy of the state’s economy.
“Atlanta is very well-positioned for Latin America in general, but specifically for Colombia.”
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