Donald Trump suspended aid to a country whose leader compared him to Adolf Hitler—and has since accused the U.S. president of murder.
Trump announced Sunday that he would slash all financial assistance for Colombia. He claimed on Truth Social that the decision was in response to levels of drug trafficking from Colombia to the United States, calling Colombian President Gustavo Petro “an illegal drug leader strongly encouraging the massive production of drugs, in big and small fields, all over Colombia.”
The U.S. president later told reporters that he planned to impose new tariffs on the Latin American country. It’s unclear what the new level would be, or how much aid would be cut. The New York Times reported Sunday that Trump had previously slashed aid to Colombia to about one fourth of what was promised at the beginning of the year.
On Saturday, Petro took to social media to criticize the Trump administration for carrying out an extrajudicial military strike on a Colombian vessel in September, claiming that the attack had killed a lifelong fisherman. “U.S. government officials have committed a murder and violated our sovereignty in territorial waters,” Petro wrote on social media.
This wasn’t the first time Petro had spoken out against Trump. Speaking in front of the United Nations last month, Petro called Trump America’s “new Hitler.”
“The old societies of Europe are collapsing,” he said, “and the United States is applauding its new Hitler. It’s not listening to its own young people, or its older people who died in the battlefields of Europe, fighting against Hitler and against his criminal ideology. Today, the same thing is being done as Hitler did, building concentration camps for migrants, and it’s stated that migrants are of an inferior race, and they blame them just like Hitler blamed the Jews. They call them drug traffickers and thieves.”
Petro responded Sunday to Trump’s outburst, in a post on X, claiming the Trump administration had been “rude and ignorant” toward Colombia, in spite of his country’s respect for American culture.
“I don’t do business like you do; I am a socialist, I believe in aid and the common good and in the common goods of humanity, the greatest of all: life, put in danger by your oil,” he wrote. “If I am not a merchant, then much less a drug trafficker; in my heart there is no greed.
“I could never get along with greed,” he added.
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