Petro and Mamdani: A meeting of progressive leaders the Trump administration thwarted
The Colombian president and the New York mayor were to meet privately, but the White House prevented it, according to ‘The Washington Post’
Colombian President Gustavo Petro had planned to meet New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, during his trip to the United States this week. Petro traveled to the U.S. on Wednesday to assume the presidency of the United Nations Security Council. In the days that followed, he intended to hold a private meeting with Mamdani, a rising progressive figure who, like him, is a staunch opponent of Donald Trump. The photo of the two left-wing leaders carried great symbolic weight: for Mamdani it would have been his first meeting with a head of state; for Petro it would have meant sealing an alliance with Democrats on the eve of decisive elections for Colombia. The meeting never took place. The reason: the White House made sure of it.
The Washington Post on Wednesday revealed behind-the-scenes work by the Trump administration to block the meeting. According to four anonymous sources, the Colombian government canceled the event after a meeting in Bogotá between officials from both countries. State Department representatives stressed that the meeting was “unacceptable.” The visit would have violated visa restrictions Washington imposed on Petro, a U.S. official cited by the paper said. The Colombians interpreted the warning as, in effect, a veiled threat to detain the president if he met with Mamdani.
The South American leader has been able to travel to the United States this week to represent Colombia while presiding over the UN Security Council. The organization’s headquarters are in New York, and an agreement allows officials, even without a visa, to attend the international body to represent their countries. According to the U.S. officials’ reading, a meeting with the mayor exceeded that permission.
The State Department canceled the Colombian president’s visa last September after he said, during a pro-Palestinian protest in New York, that U.S. soldiers should disobey Trump’s orders if they threatened “humanity.” Less than a month later, the Treasury Department sanctioned Petro for alleged ties to drug trafficking and placed him on the OFAC list. Both decisions have remained in effect despite an improvement in relations between the two leaders.
Petro and Trump met in February at the White House, after months of clashes and diplomatic crises, to smooth tensions. Although the U.S. president said the meeting had been “fantastic” and that he “got along great” with the Colombian, the tensions never fully disappeared.
Petro was scheduled to attend an event in New York on Wednesday titled “Dignity in Democracy,” convened to address how the left can “combat” inequality and “strengthen democracy.” The private meeting with the mayor was to take place after that forum. The two leaders had already met last September during Petro’s visit to the city for the UN General Assembly, when Mamdani was still a mayoral candidate and Petro had a visa.
The meeting with Mamdani had two major political components. On one hand, according to the sources cited by the Post, for the New York mayor it would have been a major boost to his profile as one of the leading figures of the global left, something the White House wanted to prevent at all costs. On the other hand, Petro sought a photo with Mamdani to bolster his party’s presidential candidate, Iván Cepeda, to counterbalance Trump’s support for a rising Colombian far right.
Colombians will go to the polls on June 21 to decide, in a runoff, who will be president until 2030. Senator Cepeda, a long-standing figure on the left and backed by Petro, will face the far-right outsider Abelardo de la Espriella, who, shortly after his first-round victory on May 31, received Trump’s endorsement. In a message the Colombian president called an “intervention,” the Republican celebrated De la Espriella’s alignment with his agenda in Latin America and said the two share “values and principles in defense of democracy, liberty and institutions.”
That is why the photo with Mamdani was so valuable to Petro: it would show progressive voters that his movement also has ties with figures of international stature. A member of Cepeda’s team told EL PAÍS this week that the candidate planned to travel to New York and Washington for that purpose, a plan not yet confirmed. The campaign’s reading was clear: if De la Espriella counts Trump as an ally, the left-wing candidate needs to appear in the U.S. and meet the most visible Democrat today. It is no longer clear whether that meeting will happen.
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