Official Response from Gustavo Petro to Donald Trump's Sanctions

Trump, I don't really like traveling to the United States, it's a bit boring, but I admit there are meritorious things. I like going to the Black neighborhoods of Washington, where I saw an entire fight in the American capital between Black people and Latinos, with barricades, which seemed absurd to me, because they should unite.

I confess that I like Walt Whitman, Paul Simon, Noam Chomsky, and Miller.

I confess that Sacco and Vanzetti, who share my blood, are memorable in U.S. history, and I follow them. They were murdered by union leaders with the electric chair, the fascists who are within the United States as well as in my country.

I don't like your oil, Trump; you are going to annihilate the human species because of greed. Perhaps one day, over a glass of whiskey, which I accept despite my gastritis, we can talk frankly, but it's difficult because you consider me an inferior race, and I am not, nor is any Colombian.

So if you know someone who is stubborn, it's me, full stop. With their economic power and arrogance, they can try to carry out a coup d'état as they did with Allende. But I die by my law; I resisted torture, and I resist you. I don't want enslavers next to Colombia; we already had many, and we freed ourselves. What I want next to Colombia are lovers of freedom. If you cannot come with me, I will go elsewhere. Colombia is the heart of the world, and you have not understood that; it is the country of yellow butterflies, of Remedios's beauty, but also of the colonels Aureliano Buendía, of whom I am one, perhaps the last.

You will kill me, but I will survive in my city, which predates yours, in the Americas. We are a people of the winds, of the mountains, of the Caribbean Sea, and of freedom.

You don't like our freedom, fine. I don't shake the hands of white slave traders. I shake the hands of Lincoln's white libertarian heirs and the Black and white farmers of the United States, before whose graves I cried and prayed on a battlefield I reached after traversing the mountains of Italian Tuscany and after recovering from COVID.

These are the United States, and before them I kneel, before no one else.

Overthrow me, Mr. President, and the Americas and humanity will respond.

Colombia now stops looking north and looks to the world. Our blood comes from the blood of the Caliphate of Córdoba, the civilization of its time, from the Roman Latins of the Mediterranean, the civilization of its time, which founded the republic, democracy in Athens; Our blood made resistant Black people out of the slaves you transformed into slaves. In Colombia, the first free territory in America, before Washington, of all America, I take refuge in its African songs.

My land is made up of goldsmiths who worked in the time of the Egyptian pharaohs and the world's first artists in Chiribiquete.