Under threats from President Donald Trump that included steep tariffs, President Gustavo Petro of Colombia has relented and will allow US military planes to fly deportees into the country, after turning two transports back in response to what he called inhumane treatment. Before caving in, Petro had issued a withering statement addressed to Trump. A translation by Ed Krassenstein, an “AI & crypto futurist”, on X

Trump, I don’t really like travelling to the US, it’s a bit boring, but I confess that there are some commendable things. I like going to the black neighbourhoods of Washington, where I saw an entire fight in the US capital between blacks and Latinos with barricades, which seemed like nonsense to me, because they should join together.

I confess that I, like Walt Whitman and Paul Simon and Noam Chomsky and Miller, confess that Sacco and Vanzetti (Italian immigrants who were controversially convicted of murdering a guard and a paymaster during the April 15, 1920, armed robbery of the Slater and Morrill Shoe Company in Massachusetts) who have my blood, are memorable in the history of the US and I follow them. They were murdered by labour leaders with the electric chair, the fascists who are within the US as well as within my country. I don’t like your oil, Trump, you’re going to wipe out the human species because of greed.

Maybe one day, over a glass of whisky, which I accept despite my gastritis, we can talk frankly about this, but it’s difficult because you consider me an inferior race and I’m not, nor is any Colombian. So if you know someone who is stubborn, that’s me, period. You can try to carry out a coup with your economic strength and your arrogance, like they did with Allende (former Chile President Salvador Allende). But I will die in my law, I resisted torture and I resist you. I don’t want slavers next to Colombia, we already had many and we freed ourselves. What I want next to Colombia are lovers of freedom. If you can’t accompany me, I’ll go elsewhere.

Colombia is the heart of the world and you didn’t understand that, this is the land of the yellow butterflies, of the beauty of Remedios, but also of the colonels Aureliano Buendía, of which I am one, perhaps the last. You will kill me, but I will survive in my people, which is before yours, in the Americas. We are peoples of the winds, the mountains, the Caribbean Sea and of freedom.

You don’t like our freedom, okay. I don’t shake hands with white slavers. I shake hands with the white libertarian heirs of Lincoln and the black and white farm boys of the US, at whose graves I cried and prayed on a battlefield, which I reached after walking the mountains of Italian Tuscany and after being saved from Covid.

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

Overthrow me, President, and the Americas and humanity will respond. Colombia now stops looking north, looks at the world, our blood comes from the blood of the Caliphate of Cordoba, the civilisation of that time, of the Roman Latins of the Mediterranean, the civilisation of that time, who founded the republic, democracy in Athens; our blood has the black resistance fighters turned into slaves by you.

In Colombia is the first free territory of America, before Washington, of all America, there I take refuge in its African songs. My land is made up of goldsmiths who worked in the time of the Egyptian pharaohs and of the first artists in the world in Chiribiquete. You will never rule us. The warrior who rode our lands, shouting freedom, who is called Bolívar, opposes us.

Our people are somewhat fearful, somewhat timid, they are naive and kind, loving, but they will know how to win the Panama Canal, which you took from us with violence. Two hundred heroes from all of Latin America lie in Bocas del Toro, today’s Panama, formerly Colombia, whom you murdered. I raise a flag and as Gaitán said, even if it remains alone, it will continue to be raised with the Latin American dignity that is the dignity of America, which your great-grandfather did not know, and mine did, Mr President, an immigrant in the US.

Your blockade does not scare me, because Colombia, besides being the country of beauty, is the heart of the world. I know that you love beauty as I do, do not disrespect it and you will give it your sweetness. FROM TODAY ON, COLOMBIA IS OPEN TO THE ENTIRE WORLD, WITH OPEN ARMS, WE ARE BUILDERS OF FREEDOM, LIFE AND HUMANITY. I am informed that you impose a 50% tariff on the fruits of our human labour to enter the United States, and I do the same. Let our people plant corn that was discovered in Colombia and feed the world.