Camilo
Pérez-Bustillo
Colombia, along
with Mexico, Brazil and Honduras, are already resisting the Trump
administration’s neo-imperial regional aspirations.
Colombia's
President Gustavo Petro (L) speaks next to Honduras's President Xiomara
Castro during the CELAC Summit in Buccament Bay, Saint Vincent and the
Grenadines, on March 1, 2024. RANDY BROOKS / AFP via Getty Images
Colombian
President Gustavo Petro, a former political prisoner who played a leading role
in Colombia’s revolutionary movement, is the first head of state both in the
region and globally who has challenged Donald Trump directly, pushing back
against the Trump administration’s treatment of Colombian immigrants facing
deportation.
Petro was
ultimately successful (at least for now) in resisting the U.S.’s military
deportation flights, demanding humane treatment for those deported, and at
least initially in securing unprecedented U.S concessions involving the return
of Colombian migrants on Colombian aircraft, including Petro’s official plane,
as honored guests. Petro also personally welcomed those who landed later, in
images of concrete solidarity that will long resonate in the region.
Unsurprisingly, mainstream and right-wing media in the U.S. and elsewhere still
have insisted that Colombia “caved in” or “surrendered.”
A heated initial
exchange between Petro and Trump on X (formerly Twitter) included threats
involving reciprocal imposition of steep tariffs and a series of retaliatory
commercial and visa measures by the U.S. that heralded an unprecedented
regional trade war and Colombia’s potentially ruinous destabilization. This
foreshadows what might unfold soon in related contexts such as Mexico and
Canada.
MAGA’s Domestic
War Against Migrants and Its Hemispheric Dimensions
The new Trump
administration’s signature policies of mass detention and mass deportation have
become the most concrete expressions of the hegemonic pretensions — and
hemispheric projections — of the “America First” ideology in its current phase.
This includes
Trump’s threats to reestablish U.S. control over the Panama Canal by force, in
violation of the 1977 Torrijos-Carter treaties and the UN Charter, and the
administration’s decision to revive the use of the U.S military base at
Guantánamo — which Cuba has long argued is an illegally occupied Cuban
territory — as a detention center for as many as 30,000 migrants. Guantánamo is
best known as the site of the notorious U.S. torture center where hundreds have
been held without trial for their supposed links to 9/11.
However, many
don’t recall that this base was also the site where hundreds of migrants were
held in deplorable conditions by the U.S. in the 1990s after being intercepted
by the Coast Guard in international waters as they fled the impact of U.S.
interventionist policies in Cuba and Haiti. More recently, smaller numbers have
been detained indefinitely at the Migrant Operations Center there, in
“prison-like conditions where refugees are trapped without access to the
outside world in a punitive system operated by the Departments of Homeland
Security and State,” according to a September 2024 report issued by the
International Refugee Assistance Project.
A surge in
unprecedented U.S. military deportation flights, combined with regional
indignation over the longstanding inhumane treatment of migrants deported from
the U.S., has finally become more widely visible through Colombia and Brazil’s
pushback, as well as Mexico’s apparent behind-the-scenes denial of landing
permission and airspace to military deportation flights.
Organizations
such as Witness at the Border have long tracked the frequency, volume and
destinations of U.S. deportation flights, thanks to the extraordinarily
dedicated work of my colleague Tom Cartwright. The Haitian Bridge Alliance,
Cameroon Advocacy Network, and independent researchers such as Sarah Towle have
carefully documented how these flights are characterized by cruel and abusive
treatment of migrants in U.S. custody that is tantamount to torture, and may be
equivalent to forced disappearances.
Both torture and
disappearances of this kind are recognized as crimes against humanity pursuant
to well-established international law, such as the Rome Statute of the
International Criminal Court and relevant UN human rights conventions. It is
these kinds of injustices that have provided the spark for a potentially
historic step forward in Latin American regional resistance to U.S. hegemony.
An emergency
regional summit to develop a unified response to the Trump administration was
called on very short notice by Honduras and then cancelled without detailed
explanation, reportedly because of an insufficient basis of consensus about
next steps. Honduras holds the current presidency pro tempore of the Community
of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC, initials in Spanish). Honduran
President Xiomara Castro will soon be succeeded in this rotating post by Petro,
providing him with an even broader platform.
CELAC is
intended as the most recent vehicle for the regional defense of Latin American
sovereignty against all of the recurrent forms of U.S. intervention that have
chacterized the history of the hemisphere since the 1823 Monroe Doctrine. It
has the potential to align much more closely with the Bolivarian vision of
continental unity free of U.S. hegemony and intervention than the
U.S.-dominated “Pan-Americanism” of the Organization of American States.
This builds on
the history of Latin American initiatives such as the Panama Canal treaties and
the Contadora and Esquipulas peace processes, which were ultimately successful
in laying the basis for ending the intertwined Central American wars of the
1980s in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. These wars were the fruit of the
U.S.’s pretensions of regional domination within the framework of the Cold War.
Similarly, the
historic Cartagena Declaration of 1984 expanded the definition of refugee
status in Latin America and the Caribbean to include those “persons who have
fled their countries because their lives, safety or freedom have been
threatened by generalized violence, foreign aggression, internal conflicts,
massive violation of human rights or other circumstances which have seriously
disturbed public order.”
This approach
was reaffirmed in December 2024 through the Chile Declaration and Plan of
Action. All of this is an integral part of the landscape that MAGA’s
neo-imperial project is seeking to reconfigure and ultimately erase.
Background to
Recent Events
Colombia was the
most explicit in its rejection of military flights and of the abusive
conditions of transport of deported migrants, which built on parallel and
ultimately convergent Mexican and Brazilian recalcitrance.
Honduras
meanwhile reminded the new administration that the military cooperation
agreements necessary to maintain the presence of the U.S.’s strategic Soto Cano
Air Base — the only one of its kind in Central America — might have to be
revisited if Trump moved ahead with mass deportations. Furthermore, officials
in both Honduras and Colombia highlighted the possibility of closer relations
with China, and Colombian alignment with BRICS as potential alternative routes,
in an attempt to distance themselves from the U.S. under Trump.
The deportation
flights are crucial propagandistic and logistical elements in the overall
machinery of terror (“shock and awe”) that the Trump administration has
unleashed against migrant families, communities and our countries of origin.
The haunting
images of rows of shackled migrants being loaded onto military cargo planes
have spread throughout the world. These are the sacrificial talismans of the
new MAGA regime, and are intended to have global resonance.
The recent
diplomatic crisis between the U.S. and Colombia must be understood as a new
(potentially regional) trade war which directly reflects the broader
international implications of the new administration’s immigration and border
policies, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s newly minted role as a global
enforcer of these measures. But the crisis must also be viewed within the
historical and contemporary context of U.S.-Colombia and U.S.-Latin American
relations, including the revival of tensions related to control of the Panama
Canal.
Relevant
Historical and Contemporary Context
The relevant
context ranges from Colombia’s historically central place in U.S. national
security and “drug war” strategies (such as “Plan Colombia,” with its
disastrous impact on human rights) since the Cold War, to Colombia’s continuing
internal armed conflicts and persistent human rights crisis, to its role as a
key country of transit from Venezuela to Panama through the Darien Gap.
It was in
Colombia that the U.S.’s “national security doctrine” was first tested in Latin
America, in what eventually became the longest-lasting, most devastating and
labyrinthine of Latin America’s internal armed conflicts, which has been
described as the “world’s longest war.” This has led in turn to a still
incomplete peace process that includes the international community’s most
intricate and wide-ranging transitional justice mechanisms.
Petro has been a
leading critic of the human cost of these policies in Colombia and
internationally, which in his view have led to a combined total of over a
million deaths in Latin America — primarily in Colombia and Mexico — during the
last 40 years.
Colombia became
the poster child for the genesis of what have become regional drug wars. It
then became the primary staging ground for the mutation of its war on drugs
into a purported “war on terror” after September 11. This in turn helped
legitimize former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe’s ruthless authoritarian
rule between 2002 and 2010. Colombia thus historically served as a test case
that laid the foundation for the Trump administration’s current explicit
intention of designating drug cartels in states like Mexico and Colombia as
threats to MAGA’s conception of “national security,” in order to facilitate
armed U.S. intervention.
A key new factor
reshaping this landscape is the leftist character of the Petro government and
Petro’s regional and global leadership role as Latin America’s most
consistently progressive spokesperson. This notably includes Petro’s advocacy
for concrete measures of global climate justice, and his insistence on
explicitly denouncing the ongoing genocide in Gaza and eventually severing
Colombia’s diplomatic relations with Israel. It also includes Petro’s efforts
to gradually consolidate an alliance with Mexico and Brazil to varying degrees,
based on shared political affinities.
Petro’s
government in Colombia is an especially ripe target for the Trump
administration, because according to Rubio, it now falls in the same basket as
the ideological threats he associates with Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. Rubio
was especially incensed by Petro’s position on Gaza and his rupture of
diplomatic relations with Israel, which he associated with Petro’s allegedly
“far-left Marxist” views. It would be surprising if Rubio’s stance towards
Petro softened in his new role as secretary of state.
Deportation
Flights as a Methodology of Deterrence
The new
administration’s focus on the mass detention and mass deportation of migrants
constitutes a reloaded version of the murderous doctrine of “prevention through
deterrence” that has driven U.S. immigration and border policy since its
adoption in 1994.
This strategy
has resulted in thousands of migrant deaths at or en route to the U.S.-Mexico
border and tens of thousands throughout the world. It is an integral part of
the architecture of “externalization” that has characterized migration policies
from the U.S.-Mexico border, to the peripheries of the European Union in the
Mediterranean, to Africa, the Middle East and Australia.
All of this
comes with the trappings implied by the rhetoric of “invasion,” which completes
the stigmatization of migrants as inherent, criminal “threats” to what Trump
defines as “national security.”
In this way, the
“securitization” of immigration and border policy is combined with
criminalization, the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border and the extension
of U.S. policies terrorizing migrants to Mexico and beyond.
MAGA’s
hemispheric vision encompasses Panama’s Darien Gap (adjacent to its long
coveted canal) and the borders of Colombia, extending deep into the southern
cone of Latin America, and eventually to the “triple border” region where
Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay converge. This framework also includes the
Caribbean and the newly (unilaterally) renamed “Gulf of America,” through
similar policies applied to Haiti, Cuba, and insistence on statehood within the
U.S. for the colony of Puerto Rico.
Secretary of
State Rubio has enthusiastically embraced his new role, which empowers him as
the global enforcer of state terror, and as the administration’s neo-imperial
regional viceroy, wielding the contemporary version of Teddy Roosevelt’s “Big
Stick.” Cuba and Venezuela are the administration’s most enticing targets,
along with Colombia, Mexico, Nicaragua and Bolivia. But this will be coupled
with a domestic war against migrants that has now been globalized and has no
borders. Petro’s pushback has for the first time explicitly incorporated the
defense of the human rights of migrants from Latin America as a core issue that
can help mobilize regional resistance.
The Monroe
Doctrine and “Manifest Destiny” have now been reinvigorated into a Trumpian
neo-imperialism, exemplified by Rubio’s first tour as secretary of state, with
the aim of countering Chinese aspirations for increased trade and influence in
the region.
Petro’s overt
resistance to the Trump administration’s evident intention to regenerate U.S.
domination in Latin America has set a high bar for other regional leaders.
Petro has also reminded fellow leaders of the need for regional unity that was
first articulated by Simón Bolivar (Colombia’s founding leader) and has been
echoed later in contexts ranging from the Cuban and Sandinista revolutions to
Mexico’s Zapatistas. At the same time, whatever unfolds along these lines in
Latin America will have resonance as well, throughout the Global South.
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