Colombian President Gustavo Petro on Sunday retweeted a post from White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt that essentially declared President Donald Trump’s absolute victory in the showdown over Colombian deportees. Petro deleted his retweet a few hours later.
Leavitt made the nature of her original post on social media platform X quite clear, using a red-alert siren emoji to declare “the government of Colombia has agreed to all of President Trump’s terms.”
🚨The Government of Colombia has agreed to all of President Trump’s terms pic.twitter.com/mQocusSGOC
— Karoline Leavitt (@PressSec) January 27, 2025
Leavitt was referring to a very brief battle of wills that began when Colombia refused to allow two repatriation flights from the United States to land. The planes carried 160 illegal migrants who were deported in line with Trump’s pledge to tighten the anything-goes open-borders policies of former President Joe Biden.
Petro claimed he refused the repatriation flights because he did not care for the U.S. government treating people who violated its immigration laws like criminals. Petro felt the migrants were humiliated by the treatment they received aboard American military transport aircraft.
“A migrant is not a criminal and must be treated with the dignity that a human being deserves,” he declared in a post on X, launching a one-day international diplomatic conflict that would be conducted largely on social media.
Petro insisted the U.S. must “establish a protocol for the dignified treatment of migrants before we receive them.” Posting a video of deportees returned to Brazil in restraints, he announced that he would “never allow Colombians to be returned handcuffed on flights.”
The response from the Trump administration was swift and overwhelming. Trump himself returned fire on his preferred platform, Truth Social.
“I was just informed that two repatriation flights from the United States, with a large number of Illegal Criminals, were not allowed to land in Colombia. This order was given by Colombia’s Socialist President Gustavo Petro, who is already very unpopular amongst his people,” he wrote.
Trump ordered an emergency 25 percent tariff on Colombian imports, threatening to raise it to 50 percent in a week, along with a travel ban on Colombian government officials, enhanced customs inspections of Colombian nationals, and a raft of financial sanctions. An administration official told Breitbart News the U.S. embassy in Colombia was prepared to shut down on Monday morning.
“These measures are just the beginning,” Trump warned.
As things turned out, those measures were the end. Petro initially responded with a bizarre social media rant in which he declared Trump’s “blockade” did not scare him, because “Colombia, besides being the country of beauty, is the heart of the world.”
“I am informed that you impose a 50% tariff on the fruits of our human labor to enter the United States, and I do the same,” Petro threatened.
“You can try to carry out a coup with your economic strength and your arrogance, like they did with Allende. But I will die with the law on my side, I resisted torture and I resist you. You will kill me, but I will survive in my people, which preceded yours in the Americas. I don’t shake hands with white slavers, I shake hands with the white libertarian heirs of Lincoln and the black and white peasants of the USA,” the Colombian president raved, referring to the 1973 overthrow of Chilean socialist leader Salvador Allende.
Even as Petro was hammering out this purple prose, Colombian officials were scrambling to defuse the crisis. The outcome, as Leavitt said in her press release, was that Colombia wound up agreeing to “the unrestricted acceptance of all illegal aliens from Colombia returned from the United States, including on U.S. military aircraft, without limitation or delay.”
Leavitt said sanctions and tariffs on Colombia would be “held in reserve” unless “Colombia fails to honor this agreement.” Visa restrictions on Colombian officials would, however, “remain in effect until the first planeload of Colombian deportees is successfully returned.”
“Today’s events make clear to the world that America is respected again,” she said. “President Trump will continue to fiercely protect our nation’s sovereignty, and he expects all other nations in the world to fully cooperate in accepting the deportation of their citizens illegally present in the United States.”
This was the message Petro strangely decided to retweet without comment – until he, or someone in his office, quietly deleted it a few hours later.
There has been a long-running argument on social media about whether “retweets equal endorsement,” especially when someone reposts a tweet without any comment whatsoever. As Fox News reporter Bill Melugin pointed out on Sunday, when major world leaders repost statements from foreign governments without comment, it carries far more weight than an ordinary social media user’s actions.
“The Colombian president retweeted the Press Secretary’s post about this,” Melugin observed. “Certainly indicates he endorses what the Trump admin is saying about the deal. Hard to see this as anything but a full capitulation by the Colombian president after he picked a fight with Trump today.”
Petro’s quiet capitulation and uncharacteristically subdued retweet caught international media organizations by surprise, as they spent Sunday afternoon hammering out articles praising the Colombian president for his heroic resistance to the bully in the White House. For a few embarrassing hours on Sunday, a left-wing media narrative was brewing that Petro would bring Trump to his knees by threatening America’s vital strategic supply chains of coffee and Valentine’s Day flowers.
In the end, the media shifted on Monday morning to sprinkling Petro with far more tepid praise for supposedly “saving face” by uncorking a few social media rants before giving Donald Trump everything he wanted.
