Colombia’s president Gustavo Petro has claimed that U.S. officials have revoked his visa.
Petro claimed at a Cabinet meeting that the Trump administration revoked his visa, and referred to the United States president using the nickname “Donald Duck,” according to The City Paper Bogotá.
“I can’t go [to the US] anymore because I believe they took away my visa,” Petro said. “I didn’t really need a visa, but anyway, I’ve already seen Donald Duck several times, so I’ll go see other things.”
Petro did not say when exactly his travel visa was suspended. But he last visited the US in Sept. 2024 for a climate conference in Chicago and the United Nations General Assembly in New York, the Daily Mail reported.
The Colombian leader will be replaced by the minister of finance, Germán Avila, for official business in the US.
The State Department refused to confirm or deny Petro’s claim, citing the confidentiality of visa records.
“Visa records are confidential under US law; therefore, we cannot discuss the details of individual visa cases,” a State Department spokesperson told The New York Post.
In January, Petro was engulfed in a conflict with the Trump administration over accepting Colombian nationals deported from the United States.
The clash resulted in Trump threatening to slap a 25 percent tariff on Colombian imports and pursue “visa Sanctions on all Party Members, Family Members, and Supporters of the Colombian Government” as well as a “Travel Ban and immediate Visa Revocations [for] Colombian Government Officials, and all Allies and Supporters.”
Trump walked back his threat after reaching an agreement with Petro on accepting the deported migrants being returned on military planes.
However, he remains a vocal critic of Trump’s deportation policy. Last week he slammed the Trump administration for removing Venezuelan migrants labeled Tren de Aragua members to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT megaprison.
“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,’” Petro wrote on X.
