Gustavo Petro, the first-ever leftist president of Colombia, recently got into a dispute with Donald Trump over deportation policy. Through a mixture of fiery rhetoric and behind-the-scenes diplomatic wrangling, Petro successfully forced the U.S. government to agree to provide better conditions for deportees. But if you get all your news from the major U.S. papers and TV networks, you’d never know that. The prevailing narrative has been just the opposite: that it was Trump who scored a win over the Colombian government by forcing them to accept deported migrants against their will. But it’s important to understand what really happened here, because it shows that Trump is weaker than he likes to portray himself, and that the media cannot be relied on to be sufficiently skeptical of Trump’s bluster and lies.

In the U.S. media, headlines about Trump’s supposed victory have been ubiquitous. In the New York Times, we read that “Colombia Agrees to Accept Deportation Flights After Trump Threatens Tariffs,” and that “The country’s leader, Gustavo Petro, backed down after a clash with President Trump.” At CNN we get an almost identical story: “Colombia Backs Down on Accepting Deportees on Military Planes after Trump’s Tariffs Threats.” At MSNBC, we’re told that “MAGA world is crowing at Colombia’s capitulation to Trump’s bullying tactics.” The basic narrative is that Petro tried to resist Trump’s efforts to deport people to Colombia, that Trump threatened to ruin the Colombian economy in retaliation, and that Petro was forced to back down and agree to accept deportees. 

But Colombia didn’t “capitulate to Trump’s bullying tactics.” In fact, these press accounts are reporting Trump’s spin on the incident as if it’s the truth. Given that Trump is a serial liar, we should always be skeptical of his version of events. The real sequence of events was not a humiliating climbdown for Colombia. In fact, Petro demonstrated exactly how foreign leaders should stand up to Trump.

What exactly happened? Well, shortly after Donald Trump returned to office on January 20, he took the first steps toward his stated goal of using the U.S. military to deport between 10 and 15 million people. Trump signed an executive order allowing military planes (specifically C-17 and C-130 cargo planes) to be used for the mass expulsion effort, and he started deporting undocumented immigrants to Latin American countries in handcuffs and ankle shackles, regardless of whether they’d committed any crime. One of the first flights took place on January 24, when the U.S. sent 88 people back to Brazil on a civilian airliner, and the deportees reportedly suffered terrible abuse. As one passenger, Edgar Da Silva Moura, told the Agence France-Presse: 

On the plane they didn’t give us water, we were tied hands and feet, they wouldn’t even let us go to the bathroom. [...] It was very hot, some people fainted. 

Another passenger reports going without air conditioning on the plane for around four hours due to technical failures, which led some people to have “respiratory problems.” The Brazilian government immediately condemned the “indiscriminate use of handcuffs and shackles” and the “degrading treatment of passengers on the flight,” saying that it showed “flagrant disregard for the fundamental rights of Brazilian citizens.” And when he heard about the incident, Gustavo Petro was also incensed. 

On January 26, Petro announced that his government had turned away two U.S. deportation planes, these ones military C-17 jets, and was refusing to let them land in Colombia. He posted the following to social media over footage of the earlier plane’s arrival in Manaus, Brazil: 

A migrant is not a criminal and must be treated with the dignity that a human being deserves. That's why I had the US military planes that came with Colombian migrants returned. I cannot make migrants stay in a country that does not want them; But if that country returns them it must be with dignity and respect for them and for our country. On civil planes, without being treated as criminals, we will receive our compatriots. Colombia respects itself.

Crucially, Petro did not object to the deportations themselves. Colombia has long accepted U.S. deportation flights; in 2024 alone, El Colombiano reports that “the United States returned 14,200 undocumented Colombians.” Rather, Petro objected to the humiliating and degrading conditions under which migrants were being sent back, which ICE and similar agencies have come to carry out as standard practice. He insisted that migrants, even in the deportation process, should be treated with basic human dignity—a modest demand. But the United States is used to treating Latin American countries as vassal states, on the principle that “what we say goes,” and Trump was outraged at Petro’s defiance. He immediately announced on Truth Social that he would be slapping massive tariffs on Colombian exports in an effort to ruin the Colombian economy, along with visa revocations against Colombian government officials and “all allies and supporters,” plus sweeping financial sanctions under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). There is a long history of U.S. presidents punishing South American countries for failing to bend the knee to Uncle Sam (when Chile elected a leftist president in 1970, for instance, Richard Nixon ordered the CIA to “make the [Chilean] economy scream”), but Trump’s reaction was unusually swift and extreme.

Petro did not back down. He threatened tariffs of his own, and on Twitter he issued a fiery rant in which he praised Noam Chomsky and Walt Whitman and rebuked Trump’s policy and values: 

I don’t like your oil, Trump. It’s going to wipe out the human species because of greed. Maybe one day, with a glass of whiskey that I accept, despite my gastritis, we can talk frankly about this, but it's difficult because you consider me part of 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. But I will die true to my principles, I resisted torture and I resist you.[...] I am informed that you impose a 50% tariff on the fruits of our human labor to enter the United States, and I do the same. Let our people plant corn that was discovered in Colombia and feed the world.

Now, here the story gets slightly murky. The two presidents were publicly threatening one another, but behind the scenes the U.S. and Colombian governments began to negotiate over the deportation issue. Eventually they reached an agreement, the exact terms of which have not been publicly revealed. But it appears to have provided that neither side would impose tariffs (for now, anyway), that the two U.S. military flights Petro had turned back would not have to land in Colombia, and that instead Colombia would send its own planes to collect the group of migrants Trump had been trying to deport, so that they could return to their home country in dignified conditions. Petro publicly offered the migrants his own presidential plane for their flight, but it appears he eventually had them taken in planes from the Colombian air force—where they were not placed in restraints—and met them personally in Bogotá on their arrival. 

To summarize: Trump wanted the deportees taken on U.S. military planes, shackled. Colombia refused to receive deportees in this manner. Trump did not successfully force Colombia to accept his conditions. Instead, the U.S. government acceded to Petro’s demand that he be allowed to determine how the migrants came home. As the New York Times reports, it assured the Colombian government “that Colombians aboard deportation flights would not be placed in handcuffs after they were returned and would be escorted by Department of Homeland Security officials, not military personnel,” and that they would not be photographed onboard, unlike the humiliating treatment the Brazilian deportees received. And it appears that will be the arrangement going forward, as Colombia’s Foreign Minister recently announced that the country will now handle the repatriation of its own citizens in order to assure “dignified conditions upon their return.”

Why is this being framed as Trump successfully forcing Petro to “back down?” Mainly because the underlying issue is being misrepresented. The media is reporting the story as if Petro was refusing to accept deportees as such, and Trump forced him to accept deportees anyway. This is the framing Trump himself has encouraged. On Truth Social, the president wrote that “We will not allow the Colombian Government to violate its legal obligations with regard to the acceptance and return of the Criminals they forced into the United States,” ignoring that Petro’s specific objection was to the conditions under which the deportation was being carried out. To cap off his list of threats toward Petro, Trump posted an absurd AI-generated picture of himself wearing a gangsterish fedora and posing with a sign that read “FAFO,” for “fuck around and find out”:

Noam Chomsky has often observed that the United States behaves like a Mafia godfather issuing threats to other countries; with his usual bluntness, Trump adopted the same image for himself in an attempt to project strength. Later in the day, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt issued a statement claiming that:

The Government of Colombia has agreed to all of President Trump’s terms, including the unrestricted acceptance of all illegal aliens from Colombia returned from the United States, including on U.S. military aircraft, without limitation or delay.

But as we’ve seen, this wasn’t really true. The immigrants were not sent “on U.S. military aircraft,” but on Colombian ones, and the transfer was not “unrestricted” or “without limitation.” Limitations on the use of cuffs and shackles, along with other forms of mistreatment, are exactly what Petro was able to secure for the people on these flights. As they have countless times in the past, Trump and his staff offered a highly misleading account of the issue at hand, implying that the main point of contention was whether immigrants would be accepted or not (rather than humane treatment) and spinning a concession on Trump’s part into a victory. 

It’s one thing for Trump to spin a flattering narrative about himself, though; at this point it’s practically expected. It’s another thing for major U.S. media outlets to repeat his preferred narrative as truth. In the right-wing press, of course, there was a cacophony of whooping and crowing over Trump’s supposed victory, with the New York Post writing that “Trump was right to put Petro in his place.” But even the Associated Press repeated a version of that same line, saying that “Trump’s tariff threat worked on Colombia.” At Bloomberg, opinion columnist Juan Pablo Spinetto wrote that “Colombia’s Petro Showed How Not to Face Trump,” painting his approach as an embarrassing failure. CNN commentator Patrick Oppmann echoed the sentiment, writing that “Latin American leaders are learning how to handle Trump. Colombia’s president showed how not to do it.” It also appears that CNN contributed to the confusion by misattributing a quote in a different article, saying that it was Colombia that “said Sunday evening it had agreed to ‘all of President Trump’s terms,’ including the ‘unrestricted acceptance’” of deportees, when those exact words can be found in Leavitt’s January 26 White House ’s statement. At Axios, the whole incident was reported as an “early win” for Trump. Internationally, the BBC reported the outcome as “the Colombian concession,” and Al Jazeera wrote that “Trump coerced Colombia to accept deportees.” The phrase “backed down,” applied to Petro, has been ubiquitous. And for its part, the New York Times covered Leavitt’s first press conference—spin, manipulation,  and all—with the headline “White House Press Secretary Makes Steely and Unflinching Debut.” 

This is a perfect case study in how the media can wind up giving important news stories a spin that flatters the U.S. political elite. The most important failing involved is simply deference to authority. As Andrew Ancheta wrote for Current Affairs in 2021, American journalists have a disturbing tendency to treat the phrase “officials say” as a synonym for “this is true,” when in reality nothing could be further from the truth. So when the president issues a statement from the White House about his diplomatic dealings with Colombia, they’re inclined to simply accept his version of what went down; they don’t stop to think hang on, is this a lie? And when confronted with a habitual liar like Donald Trump, this flaw becomes a fatal one. As it stands, the press failed professionally, giving their readers a poor understanding of the situation on the ground in Colombia, and they failed politically, allowing Trump to turn what should have been a defeat into a propaganda victory. More recently, there have been attempts to backtrack and clarify; Bloomberg, for instance, has put out a more thorough article saying that “Trump’s Victory Over Colombia Now Looks Less Clear Cut.” But as the old saw goes, by the time the truth gets its boots on, the lie is already halfway around the world. 

There are, of course, fair criticisms to be made of Gustavo Petro. The biggest is that his stance of accepting mass deportations in principle, but quibbling over the manner of transport, is too much of a compromise in the first place. Other countries have taken harder lines against Trump’s mass expulsion plans, like Honduras, which has threatened to end military cooperation with the U.S. and kick out the troops stationed at Soto Cano Air Base. This is the criticism that Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté of the Grayzone made in a recent video, comparing Petro unfavorably to Honduran President Xiomara Castro and saying that the Colombian president “is trying to kind of set the tone, but he’s not backing it up with any real action.” Preferring Castro’s more aggressive approach is understandable, although it’s a little unfair to say Petro has taken no “real action.” But even Blumenthal and Maté, who have long been skeptical of the U.S. media, titled their video “Petro backs down hours after fiery letter to Trump,” which shows that their perception of the events has been colored by the same skewed framing as the rest of the press. Even prominent critics of U.S. foreign policy aren’t immune to that kind of thing. 

Really, though, Petro has done exactly the opposite of what commentators like Oppmann and Spinetto said. Rather than giving the world an example of how not to handle Trump, he’s provided a useful model for how to do it. Especially in light of the long and bloodstained history of U.S. aggression in Latin America, it’s remarkable that a comparatively small nation has challenged the U.S. superpower and forced it to change course. It shows that the world is changing. And as commentators in Bloomberg and Foreign Policy point out, even if you take the view that the U.S. “won” the showdown, it was likely a Pyrrhic victory in the long term, because Trump’s willingness to threaten economic disruption will likely accelerate the trend of countries looking to other, seemingly more predictable trading partners like China.

In sharp contrast to the cowardice of politicians who want to “find compromise” with Trump and his agenda, Petro has shown the value of standing your ground. He’s proven that you can defy Trump to his face, and you can force him to make concessions to you, rather than the other way around. As the next few months and years unfold, that’s a lesson people around the world will need to learn. But they can’t do that if the media never tells them the truth.