The United States will revoke the visa of Colombian President Gustavo Petro, the State Department announced this Friday, September 26, accusing it of “reckless and incendiary actions” during a pro-palestinian demonstration in New York.
“Early in the day, Colombian president @Perogustovo was held in a New York street and urged US soldiers to disobey orders and foster violence. We will revoke Petro’s visa due to their reckless and incendiary actions,” wrote the State Department of X.
Gustavo Petro, who was in New York to participate in the United Nations General Assembly, participated on Friday in a pro-palestine demonstration in the city along with the British musician Roger Waters.
A “Rescue Army”
The videos transmitted by the media showed the Colombian president in the call of left, by a speaker, to the creation of a “rescue army that will have the first task of freeing Palestine.”
“The nations of the world will bring trained and armed men to form this great army. It must be greater than that of the United States,” said Gustavo Petro, whose country broke with Israel in 2024 to protest the war in the Gaza Strip.
“Here, in New York, I ask all the soldiers of the United States army not to point to humanity with their rifles. Disobiled to the order of Trump! Obaca the order of humanity!” He exclaimed.
He estimated that the new American veto in the UN Security Council last week against a text that demanded humanitarian access and humanitarian access to Gaza, meant that “diplomacy is over.”
“Another phase of the fight”
“The history of humanity has shown us for millennia that, if diplomacy is exhausted, we must move on to another phase of the struggle,” said Gustavo Petro. According to the Colombian presidency, Gustavo Petro left the United States and was Friday night aboard a plane for Bogotá. The Colombian president said that he also owned the Italian nationality, which in principle dispenses the visa to enter the United States.
The Colombian minister of the interior of the South American country, Armando Benedetti, wrote Friday night in X that was the visa of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who should have been revoked, not that of Gustavo Petro. “But how the empire protects, attacks the only president who was quite able to tell him the truth in the face,” he said.
Degraded relationships
Relations between Colombia and the United States have deteriorated significantly since the return to Donald Trump’s power in January. On Tuesday, Gustavo Petro asked the United Nations gallery that a “criminal procedure” was launched against his US counterpart after mortal military strikes that destroyed boats in the Caribbean, according to Washington, drugs.
Even if the UN Headquarters in New York benefit from extraterritoriality, the heads of state and the government must pass through the territory of the United States to go to the annual general assembly of the organization and, therefore, must travel with an American visa.
In the past, the United States has granted visas to go to the UN to many heads of state who were hostile for them, such as Cuban leaders Fidel Castro and Muammar Gaddafi, or presidents Venezuelan, Hugo Chavez and Nicolás Maduro. This year, Washington authorized the presence of President Iranian Massaud fishshkian, but rejected a visa to the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who had to express himself by videoconference.
Source: BFM TV
