Colombia's President Gustavo Petro speaks at the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) summit, in Tegucigalpa, Honduras April 9, 2025. REUTERS/Fredy Rodriguez
Colombian President Gustavo Petro, a member of the left-wing M-19 Democratic Alliance, claimed during a nationally-televised broadcast that he can't travel to the United States anymore because he believed the Trump administration revoked his visa.
The Monday night broadcast was described as a Cabinet Meeting "presented as a 'presidential address,'" during which Petro made the "offhand remark," according to The City Paper Bogotá.
“I can’t go anymore because I believe they took away my visa,” Petro said during the broadcast. “I didn’t really need a visa, but anyway, I’ve already seen Donald Duck several times, so I’ll go see other things."
The paper reported that the comment, "delivered casually and seemingly out of context, caught his ministers off guard and comes as Colombian Foreign Minister Laura Sarabia is preparing to travel to New York to address the United Nations Security Council. At the same time, the country’s acting Finance Minister, Germán Avila, is already in the United States on official business."
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A representative from the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá told the paper that there has been “no formal notification of visa revocation.”
The paper noted that Petro has been using social media to attack El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele over the treatment of Venezuelan migrants deported by the Trump administration.
In what the paper called a "rare English-language message," Petro wrote, “Fascism in Europe created a criminal idea and gave it legal cover,” Petro wrote. “It said that you could blame a social group for the crime of an individual. That is the path that led to the holocaust of the Jews. No democratic-minded person in Latin America can accept that all of the Venezuelan people in exile are criminalized because of the crimes of the so-called ‘Tren de Aragua.’”
The U.S. Embassy in Bogotá called Petro's comments “deeply offensive” and urged "political leaders to avoid equating modern conflicts with historical genocides," the paper reported.