VIENNA — Colombian President Gustavo Petro issued a stinging rebuke of U.S. foreign policy and urged President Donald Trump’s government to pursue dialogue with Latin America over military interventions.
During an interview with POLITICO in Vienna this week, Petro said that Latin America is not a “land to be conquered,” after the Trump administration bombed alleged drug smugglers, toppled the Venezuelan president and menaced Cuba.
These aggressive moves are part of a strategic shift from a White House looking to reassert U.S. dominance across the Western Hemisphere and push back foreign influence — an approach nicknamed the “Donroe Doctrine,” after the 1823 policy of U.S. President James Monroe.
Petro, a leftist and former rebel, has emerged as one of the world’s most vocal critics of this U.S. foreign policy, periodically landing himself on Trump’s blacklist.
The Colombian president avoided any direct barbs against Trump, instead citing their February meeting in the White House as an example of the intercontinental dialogue he wants to see. Prior to that meeting, Trump had called Petro a “sick man;” afterwards, he said Petro was “terrific.”
During the conversation with POLITICO, which took place in the gilded front room of the Colombian ambassador’s Vienna residence, Petro reserved his bluntest criticism for U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and former Trump adviser and billionaire Elon Musk.
Rubio championed “Western civilization” bound by “Christian faith” at the Munich Security Conference in February, identifying mass migration as a crisis destabilizing societies “all across the West.” Musk, meanwhile, has characterized “empathy” as Western civilization’s Achilles’ heel.
Petro condemned what he saw as their promotion of a “white, Christian, Western civilization,” and warned against trying to revive “the age of the Crusades.” Such slogans belong to history, he said, and would generate an “enormous level of violence within each society.”
He then went on to praise Europe’s diversity, which he described as an “asset” despite the potential for conflict: “I believe that understanding societies in their diversity does not mean nullifying European history or European history in America,” he said.
Neither Rubio nor Musk responded to a request for comment in time for publication.
Shield of the Americas
After decades of domestic battle against gangs trafficking illegal narcotics, Petro criticized Colombia’s exclusion from Trump’s recent anti-cartel coalition, the Shield of the Americas.
“The 17 countries gathered are the least experienced in the fight against drugs in the Americas,” he said about the group’s Miami summit. “Some of them are deeply penetrated by the corruption of drug trafficking. All the countries of America are infiltrated because the effect of cash is very strong on any human being — but if anyone has experience in the fight against drugs, it is Colombia.”
Colombia and its neighbors are rich in the coca plant, which places the region at the center of the global cocaine trade and decades of U.S. anti-drug policy.
Trump’s war on drugs has involved striking alleged trafficking vessels in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean, killing more than 150 people since September 2025, according to the New York Times. Last September, Petro told the United Nations that Trump should be investigated for war crimes over the strikes, which he said targeted young people trying to escape poverty.
Speaking to POLITICO after addressing U.N. drug officials, Petro detailed Colombia’s expertise in fighting narco gangs, noting that it “has built a network of 75 countries whose police intelligence agencies coordinate with each other, and that is why we seized 3,300 tons of cocaine during my administration — the highest figure ever. We have handed over 800 drug traffickers to the U.S., collected 78,000 weapons.”
But, he said, in reference to the Shield of the Americas summit, “we weren’t invited. And you don’t go where you’re not invited.”
Climate not bombs
Petro is constitutionally barred from seeking another term in May, and with his time in office running out, he issued a plea for governments to pivot to climate action “instead of thinking about bombs.”
“We have reached a world where capitalism is showing its end,” said Petro, who joined far-left guerrilla group M-19 as a teenager and now leads the left-wing Historic Pact party.
“Its demise is not peaceful. It seems to be mired in bombs, violence and something that I have studied in depth: the climate crisis on which I have built my political project. The climate crisis scientifically heralds the end of existence — if we do not change the way we produce and consume throughout the world,” he warned.
The Colombian leader is eager to discuss climate at almost any opportunity. He told U.N. diplomats on Monday that the rise of the deadly synthetic opioid fentanyl revealed something about a society facing the potential “extinction of humanity,” calling it the “drug of the climate crisis.”
He also sees people’s reluctance to have children as part of a “culture of extinction” that pervades societies facing climate breakdown. “That decision is based on certain realities — namely, the well-founded belief that capital has reached its limit, and that its limit could be the end of the species of life,” Petro explained.
He then added that Cuba, which is now facing the threat of U.S.-sponsored regime change, could be part of an intercontinental solution to the crisis — if only America and other countries were open to dialogue.
“I believe that there are people in the U.S. government who think similarly: that instead of imposing an empire from which Cubans always liberate themselves, what is ultimately needed is to establish a dialogue between the Americas and include Cuba in the world of fiber optics and clean energy,” he said.
He then pointed to Cuba’s Covid-19 vaccine and contributions to public health as examples of how it could help — were it open to the world.
“If the United States engages in dialogue, and this means respect for the other, equity with the other, then we solve a very important part of the problem that afflicts humanity today,” Petro said.
Arnau Busquets Guàrdia and Jakob Weizman contributed to this report.
Colombian president warns US against building an empire in Latin America
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