A U.S. official told Breitbart News that the U.S. Embassy in Colombia is set to close on Monday, following Colombian President Gustavo Petro reversing his promise to accept deportation flights.
“In response to President Petro’s refusal to accept two flights of Colombian deportees, which President Petro had authorized and were previously approved at the highest levels of government, U.S. Embassy Colombia is closing the visa section tomorrow,” a U.S. official with knowledge on the matter told Breitbart News.
“Additional retaliatory measures will be rolled out soon,” the U.S. official added.
Petro, who initially said he would accept deportation flights from the U.S., refused to accept two separate flights containing a total of 160 deportable migrants.
“The U.S. cannot treat Colombian migrants as criminals,” Petro proclaimed in an X post on Sunday. “I deny the entry of American planes carrying Colombian migrants into our territory.”
“The United States must establish a protocol for the dignified treatment of migrants before we receive them,” the Colombian president added.
Notably, Petro is a Marxist revolutionary who — before becoming a politician — was a member of M-19, an urban guerrilla group that sought to seize power through violent means under the guise of social justice, the New York Times (NYT) noted in 2022.
M-19 — formed by university students, activists, and artists — orchestrated “what is considered one of the bloodiest acts in the country’s recent history: the 1985 siege of Colombia’s national judicial building that led to a battle with the police and the military, leaving 94 people dead,” the NYT reported.
The Colombian president was also an adviser to the late former president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, whose socialist policies resulted in food and basic goods becoming scarce in Venezuela.
While reminiscing on his time spent with Chávez, while hosting him in Colombia’s capital of Bogota for over a week in 1994, Petro said, “We found an ideological understanding in the fight against corruption and in the Bolivarian discourse,” the Cato Institute noted in 2024.
Alana Mastrangelo is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on Facebook and X at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
