The upcoming meeting between President Gustavo Petro and U.S. President Donald Trump, scheduled for today, February 3, has sent tremors through Colombia. The summit between both heads of state comes after a period of extreme volatility between the two countries, with visa revocations and threats of military intervention.
Yet, the meeting shouldn’t be all that surprising. A closer study of the long history of the relation between the United States and Colombia will show that this “sudden” shift is part of a recurring pattern. For over a century, Colombian presidents have traveled to Washington not merely as neighbors but as crucial partners for the northern superpower.
The necessity of maintaining sovereignty while remaining inextricably tethered to the most powerful nation in the hemisphere effectively outweighs and outlasts any administration doctrine. Even Colombia’s first left-wing President will visit 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, perhaps in the most tense diplomatic climate between the partners since the secession of Panama.
The first Colombian diplomat to meet a US President was not a President
Before the modern era of state visits began, the diplomatic relationship between the United States and Colombia was forged by a figure who never held the title of president but acted with the full weight of one.
Manuel Torres was received by President James Monroe on June 19, 1822. He became the first diplomatic representative from a former Spanish colony to be officially recognized by the United States.
Torres had spent years in Philadelphia lobbying for the cause of South American independence. His reception was more than a formal ceremony; it was the symbolic birth of Colombia as a sovereign entity in the eyes of the new global power.
He represented Colombia before the US because, at the time, the country was in a precarious state. Torres main goal was to convince the Monroe administration that Colombia was more than just a collection of rebels. His efforts culminated on June 19, 1822, when President James Monroe received him as the first official diplomatic representative from a former Spanish colony, and despite not being the President, he was received by the United States as one.
Pedro Nel Ospina, the first modern Colombian President to visit the US
While Colombia was the first former Spanish colony recognized by the US in 1821, this early cordiality was shattered in 1903 when President Theodore Roosevelt orchestrated the secession of Panama after the Colombian Senate refused to grant canal rights.
For twenty years, the “Panama Question” loomed over every interaction between the pair until the 1920s. The first modern visit occurred in May 1922, when President-elect Pedro Nel Ospina traveled to Washington to formalize the Thomson-Urrutia Treaty, securing $25 million in “indemnity” for the loss of Panama.
This visit transformed a national grievance into a catalyst for modernization, but it also initiated an excessive borrowing from American banks that tied the Colombian economy to the fluctuations of the New York Stock Exchange, and would later have an overwhelmingly negative impact during the great depression.
The golden age of Colombia – US relations
The relationship reached a “golden age” during the 1930s and 40s, driven by the ideological affinity between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Alfonso López Pumarejo.
López Pumajero’s “Revolution on the March” was a South American mirror to the New Deal, and his 1942 visit solidified Colombia as a key regional defender of the Panama Canal during World War II.
This era professionalized the Colombian military under US guidance, with Colombia becoming one of the first nations to send officers to the School of the Americas. It established a precedent that lasts until today, where security cooperation became the primary currency of the relationship. This trend would only intensify during the Cold War.
The Alliance for Progress era
By 1960, the bilateral relationship between the two countries was increasingly defined by the United States’ defensive doctrine against the spread of communism following the Cuban Revolution. This era transformed Colombian presidents into symbols of democratic stability in a volatile hemisphere. The most celebrated visit of the mid-century occurred in April 1960, when President Alberto Lleras Camargo arrived in Washington. As the architect of the National Front, the power-sharing agreement that ended the worst of Colombia’s partisan bloodshed, Lleras Camargo was hailed as a hero of democratic resilience.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower personally welcomed him at the airport, extending special gratitude for Colombia’s role as the only Latin American nation to send troops to the Korean War. During his address at the White House, Lleras Camargo delivered a chilling warning: the “Cold War theater” had officially shifted to the Western Hemisphere.
He argued that only a massive infusion of development aid, which he said was a “Marshall Plan for Latin America”, could protect the continent from communist influence. This rhetoric became the direct ideological precursor to John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress. The visit was a diplomatic triumph, securing a $70 million credit from the Development Loan Fund.
When Carlos Lleras Restrepo later visited the U.S. in June 1969, he was the first Latin American head of state to visit the newly inaugurated Nixon administration. Lleras Restrepo challenged the traditional dynamics of the relationship, demanding a partnership based on “trade not aid”. In Oval Office meetings, he aggressively lobbied for the completion of the Pan-American Highway through the Darien Gap. He viewed this “physical integration” as the ultimate defense against both economic isolation and the threat of communist insurgency.
He also confronted Nixon over “additionality” clauses in US loans, which forced Colombia to purchase American products even when more affordable local or international alternatives were available. While Nixon remained focused on nationalist sentiments rising in the Andes, Lleras Restrepo’s visit solidified Colombia’s role as a sophisticated technical partner rather than a mere aid recipient
The drug pivot of the 70s
The pivotal moment of this era of the 1970s occurred on September 25, 1975, when President Alfonso López Michelsen met with President Gerald Ford. While the meeting initially began with the formal pleasantries of two leaders agreeing they had “no problems,” the dialogue quickly transformed into a blunt confrontation regarding the rising threat of narcotics.
López Michelsen delivered a stark, prophetic warning that would resonate for the next half-century: he identified the United States as the true engine of the crisis. He argued that the US was the primary center of drug demand and that the resulting “planes, boats, and cash” from American traffickers were actively corrupting the Colombian state. The economic disparity he highlighted was staggering; while the US administration had offered a mere $900,000 in aid to combat trafficking, criminal cartels were already spending an estimated $250 million on bribes within Colombia.
This visit was also characterized by López Michelsen’s frustration with the burgeoning international narrative that cast Colombia as the sole villain of the drug trade. He famously complained to Ford about a New York Times article that placed the burden of the drug problem on Colombia, quipping, “They blame me for everything else!” Beyond narcotics, the visit revealed López Michelsen’s role as a vital regional intermediary. He used his audience with Ford to act as a secret messenger for Panama’s Omar Torrijos, urging the US to conclude the Canal negotiations. He warned that a failure to settle the treaty would leave Torrijos unable to control his own radicalized base, potentially destabilizing the entire region.
Colombian Presidents who visited the US during the 80s
The 1980s saw the bilateral relationship split between two distinct but overlapping fronts: the dying Cold War in Central America and the explosive escalation of the Drug War at home. This decade was characterized by Colombian presidents who, like Michelsen, attempted to lecture Washington on the root causes of violence while simultaneously seeking the military hardware necessary to survive it. In April 1985, President Belisario Betancur visited the Reagan White House. Betancur was the primary driving force behind the Contadora process, a Latin American diplomatic effort designed to end the civil wars in Central America without US military intervention.
Reagan, who had received a cool reception during his own 1982 visit to Bogotá, greeted Betancur with formal warmth but deep ideological skepticism. Betancur utilized his time in Washington to deliver a series of lectures to Congress, arguing that the “Alliance for Peace” required a new doctrine of cooperation rather than mere tolerance. He famously linked the region’s ongoing external debt crisis to the survival of democracy, insisting that economic strangulation was as much a threat to stability as communist subversion. By the end of the decade, the focus shifted from regional peace to domestic survival. President Virgilio Barco visited George H.W. Bush in September 1989, just weeks after the Medellín Cartel assassinated the leading presidential candidate, Luis Carlos Galán.
Barco arrived in Washington as a commander-in-chief in a “total war” against the big cartels. His visit secured a rapid infusion of US military aid through the “Andean Initiative,” which included an immediate $65 million drawdown of defense equipment. However, a non-obvious fact of this meeting was that Barco spent much of his time complaining about the collapse of the International Coffee Agreement. He argued that the loss of coffee revenue was more damaging to Colombian stability than the cartels themselves, attempting to save the agricultural heart of his country even as the US focused on the “militarization” of the conflict.
President César Gaviria visited Washington in February 1991, during the very weeks that the Constituent Assembly was rewriting Colombia’s 1886 Constitution. Gaviria’s mission was to sell Washington on his “Liberal vision of peace”, a plan to modernize the judiciary to make narco-terrorism illegitimate.
His visit was highly impactful, securing the first $20 million of a massive judicial support package. However, he faced the delicate task of explaining the 1991 ban on extradition to a skeptical Bush administration. Gaviria argued that the “nearly unanimous” desire for peace in Colombia required negotiating the surrender of cartel leaders in exchange for reduced sentences, a move that would ultimately strain bilateral trust in the years leading up to the Samper crisis.
The Samper Crisis
The mid-1990s represented the most profound collapse of bilateral trust in the century-long history of US-Colombia relations. This era was defined by the presidency of Ernesto Samper (1994–1998), an administration that became domestically and internationally synonymous with the Proceso 8000, the judicial and political earthquake triggered by allegations that the Cali Cartel had systematically infiltrated the highest levels of the Colombian state.
The crisis ignited almost immediately following Samper’s 1994 election, as evidence emerged suggesting that millions of dollars from the Cali Cartel had funneled into his presidential campaign. The US response was unprecedented in its diplomatic severity. When Samper attended the 1994 Summit of the Americas in Miami, he was met with a wall of open hostility and suspicion from the Clinton administration. This was the only instance when President Samper met President Clinton, as he never visited the White House.
In July 1996, the United States took the rare and drastic step of revoking President Samper’s visa. Washington declared the sitting head of state “not welcome” on American soil, justifying the move with the claim that he had “assisted or abetted” international drug trafficking. This move effectively transformed the leader of the United States’ most strategic Andean partner into an international pariah. Until Petro’s Visa revocation, it had been the only instance in history where a sitting Colombian president had been formally barred from entering the United States.
As the Proceso 8000 paralyzed Bogotá, the US government deployed its most potent diplomatic weapon, which has also been recently deployed, the “decertification” mechanism. For multiple consecutive years, Washington officially decertified Colombia, branding the nation a threat to democracy and signaling to the global community that the Colombian state was compromised by criminal interests. This status triggered mandatory cuts in aid and economic sanctions.
The period was further defined by the “isolation strategy” championed by the US Ambassador to Colombia, Myles Frechette. A leaked memo from Frechette explicitly called for the total isolation of Samper, successfully freezing all high-level diplomatic contact and leaving the bilateral relationship in a state of functional paralysis.
By 1997, the vacuum of leadership and the total breakdown of institutional cooperation had pushed Colombia to the edge of chaos. With its president isolated and its reputation in the mud, the state’s authority withered while territory was increasingly seized by various armed groups. Contemporary observers began to describe Colombia as a “failed state” in the making. The lasting impact of this period was the total evaporation of the bilateral trust that had been built over decades, a void that would only be filled years later by the massive, multi-billion-dollar institutional intervention known as Plan Colombia.
Plan Colombia
The late 1990s marked the beginning of an institutional rescue of the bilateral partnership, spearheaded by the transition from the crisis years of the Samper administration to a massive, multi-billion-dollar framework of cooperation.
The rescue began with President Andrés Pastrana’s 1998 visit to Washington, which served as the foundational trip for Plan Colombia. While the plan was originally conceived by Pastrana as a “Marshall Plan” for social development and peace-building, designed to end the armed conflict and promote economic growth, it underwent a radical transformation as peace talks with the FARC collapsed.
A key and often overlooked figure in this evolution was then-Senator Joe Biden, who visited Pastrana in Cartagena in early 2000. Biden became one of the Plan’s most vocal defenders in the US Senate, arguing that it was not a “civil war” but a fight against a criminal minority. Under his and the Clinton administration’s influence, the plan pivoted sharply toward military hardware and counter-narcotics efforts. Between 2000 and 2005, roughly $2.8 billion in U.S. aid flowed into the country, with 68% of those funds dedicated to the military and police to reclaim territory from guerrilla and paramilitary groups.
The US backed Uribe’s democratic security
President Álvaro Uribe masterfully recalibrated this relationship for the post-9/11 world. During his first official visit as president-elect in June 2002, and subsequent meetings with George W. Bush, Uribe reframed Colombia’s internal conflict not as a localized insurgency, but as a front in the global War on Terror.
By convincing Washington that groups like the FARC and the AUC were “narco-terrorists” indistinguishable from global criminal networks, Uribe secured the removal of restrictions that had previously limited US aid to strictly counter-drug operations.
This strategic alignment reached a high point in August 2005, when Bush hosted Uribe at his private ranch in Crawford, Texas, a rare honor reserved for the closest US allies. Uribe used this “mutual trust” to institutionalize the “Democratic Security” policy, which, backed by sustained US funding, led to staggering drops in homicides and kidnappings, transforming Colombia into the United States’ most important strategic partner in the region.
Santos and the Peace Process
President Juan Manuel Santos transitioned the relationship from the “militarized” focus of the Uribe years toward a framework centered on the 2016 Peace Accord. Santos was notably vocal about changing the power dynamic, famously stating during a 2013 visit to the White House that Colombians “always came as beggars… but on this occasion we meet as equals”.
The climax of this era was the February 2016 visit, where President Barack Obama and Santos commemorated 15 years of Plan Colombia by announcing its successor: Peace Colombia. This new initiative moved away from pure combat aid toward supporting demining, rural development, and the verification of the peace deal.
Santos leveraged his relationship with Obama, whom he had privately informed of the peace talks as early as 2011, to secure the appointment of a US Special Envoy to the process, ensuring Washington’s “bipartisan” stamp of approval on the negotiations.
Ivan Duque made the most visits to the United States out of any Colombian President
President Iván Duque made a record eight visits to the United States during his four-year term, navigating a relationship increasingly squeezed by the migration crisis in Venezuela and the return of a more transactional US foreign policy.
Duque’s visits, particularly his meetings with Donald Trump in 2019 and 2020, were defined by his “Peace with Legality” policy, which sought to implement the peace deal while returning to a harder line on coca eradication.
Duque also shifted the focus toward economic reactivation and energy transition, frequently meeting with Wall Street leaders and Silicon Valley executives to woo investors.
In March 2022, his visit to Joe Biden resulted in a major diplomatic milestone, the designation of Colombia as a Major Non-NATO Ally, solidifying the “strategic anchor” status that had been building for over twenty years. This designation was the final institutional brick laid before the current era of volatility under the Petro administration.
The meeting between Petro and Trump
This brings the narrative to the current, precarious moment. Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s first leftist president, and Donald Trump have shared a relationship defined by extreme hostility.
In 2025, the US revoked Petro’s visa after he urged US soldiers to “disobey the orders of Trump,” while Trump labeled Petro a “sick man” and threatened military action against the Colombian government.
The January 2026 interaction that paved the way for the upcoming White House visit was a classic piece of Colombian presidential theater. Following a sudden phone call, Petro claimed to have explained the “real numbers” of drug seizures to Trump, who, in turn, called the conversation a “Great Honor”, a stunning reversal of his previous rhetoric.
Petro, who doesn’t speak English, will meet President Donald Trump in a meeting that could forever change the relationship between Colombia and the most powerful country in the Western Hemisphere.