Far-left President of Colombia Gustavo Petro said on Wednesday that he will stop using Twitter (or “X”) after he caused an hours-long diplomatic crisis with the United States by refusing to accept a deportation flight and disparaging Colombia’s longtime ally in a post published at nearly 4:00 a.m. local time.
Petro, in remarks given after swearing in his new Foreign Minister Laura Sarabia, said that it might be time to “switch” to another social media platform. The far-left president claimed that the “Aryans in the United States,” apparently a reference to the term as used by Nazi Germany, are happy on Twitter after the deportation of Colombian “delinquents” of which, according to him, 42 were children.
“I saw on Elon Musk’s Twitter — which I have to change platform — I saw that the whites, the Aryans in the United States were happy. Including Colombian Aryans, who are not so Aryan,” Petro said. “They are happy because the riff raff is out, delinquents, they told them.”
“We brought 42 children. How is Mr. Trump is going to tell 42 Colombian children that they are delinquents? In the same way that he says that to 42 children, he will say it to hundreds of thousands,” he continued. “That is what they thought in 1933. Humanity and its wisdom had overcome that. Now it sounds like the effects of drug addiction in the Colombian press.”
Petro, a proud former member of the Marxist M19 terrorist guerrilla and Colombia’s first leftist president ever, is an avid user of Twitter, where he often delivers long, unhinged rants that have become the center of several controversies. His most prominent posts include, but are not limited to, statements single-handedly eroding Colombia’s decades-long diplomatic ties with Israel, lamenting the ouster of former Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, and condemning Hispanic supporters of President Donald Trump.
In his most recent controversy, Petro published a message in the early morning hours of Sunday in which he abruptly announced that Colombia would not accept a U.S. deportation flight his country had previously agreed to welcome.
President Donald Trump responded to Petro’s abrupt decision by announcing a barrage of retaliatory measures that included the imposition of a 25-percent tariff on Colombian goods, a travel ban and visa sanctions to Colombian government officials, and banking and financial sanctions, among others.
Petro responded to President Trump with a now-famous rant in which he invited Trump, famously a non-drinker, to share a glass of whisky but also accused him of being a racist. The post prompted global confusion and mockery and Bogotá, apparently independently of Petro, ultimately announced it had “agreed to all” of President Trump’s terms.
Reports published this week by The New York Times and Colombia’s Noticias Caracol indicated that Colombian government officials urged conservative former President Álvaro Uribe Vélez to “call his friends in Washington,” including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and help the far-left government defuse the diplomatic crisis.
The time and circumstances of Petro’s controversial tweet prompted Colombian journalists and politicians to publicly question Petro’s sobriety at the time he started feuding with the United States, as well as ask about his whereabouts as the crisis unfolded throughout the day. Local outlets reported that the Colombian presidential palace had “no information on the matter” of Petro’s Sunday whereabouts.
Petro refuted claims of drunkenness and accused journalists who questioned his sobriety of being cipayos, a pejorative term used in South America to describe someone at the service of “foreign interests.”
Although Petro claimed on Wednesday that it was time to stop using Twitter and switch to another platform, he nevertheless continued to publish messages on his official Twitter account throughout the remainder of that day.
In one such message, Petro delivered a rant in response to a local news report covering remarks by President Trump on Wednesday in which he said that Colombia “apologized to us profusely within the hour.”
Petro addressed President Trump and said he would apologize “if I had been complicit in the genocide in Gaza,” inviting him to “fight climate change and really decrease, then, migration.” Petro also called Trump to fight for the regulation of the “digital cloud.”
Petro said:
Perk up! remove the economic blockades and you will really decrease migration.
Perk up! let’s fight for the digital cloud to be regulated by the world public powers; if, on the contrary, it is managed by the mega rich of the USA and China as their private property, when it is the accumulated knowledge of all humanity and its data, then, there will only be hundreds of millions of workers in the streets fired all over the world, and migration will really increase.
Perk up! The government of Colombia is willing to fight, with you, so that people do not kill each other or so that the powerful stop imprisoning or murdering children in the world with bombs. I assure you, if we end wars, migration will decrease.
I am here to help you in these tasks, not with the injustices.
Shortly afterwards, Petro published a separate message claiming that Sunday was not the first time Colombia suspended a U.S. deportation flight of Colombian nationals. Petro said that on May 5, 2023, he made “the same demand” to the administration of former President Joe Biden of having the deportees “brought on commercial flights and without handcuffs.”
“It was a direct instruction that I gave personally to the then director of immigration, Fernando García,” Petro said. “At that time, Biden did not have the same reaction as Trump and the situation of the returnees was improved. Now, we expect the same, we maintain our same position.”
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
