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For a few hours on Sunday, the United States and Colombia engaged in a full-blown economic tête-à-tête. President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social that “two repatriation flights” of to-be-deported U.S. immigrants “were not allowed to land in Colombia.” This spurred him to impose “urgent and decisive retaliatory measures” against the South American ally that included a 25 percent tariff on all imports, a travel ban on Colombian government officials “and all Allies and Supporters,” increased surveillance of all Colombian nationals and goods within U.S. borders, and sanctions on cross-country financial transactions.
The diverted planes were real, but there were some missing details. Colombia had previously agreed to accept these passengers, according to CNN, but the government had backtracked because of how the deportees had been treated. As Colombian President Gustavo Petro noted in a Sunday-morning public statement, the immigrants in question had been loaded onto military-owned airplanes instead of chartered civilian aircraft—a “highly unusual” move, as Rolling Stone put it. “We will receive our fellow citizens on civilian planes, without treating them like criminals,” Petro had written, hours before Trump came in with the threats.
In subsequent posts, Petro highlighted the fact that he had temporarily blocked such flights from the Biden administration in 2023 for similar reasons, and later responded to Trump with a lengthy tweet decrying American racism and announcing a 50 percent counter-tariff on imports of U.S. goods.
The defiance didn’t last long, however. In response to warnings from domestic experts that this tariff clash would decimate Colombia’s economy, Petro’s administration agreed to Trump’s repatriation terms and has sidestepped the trade war, for now. The White House boasted that the South American nation would facilitate “unrestricted acceptance of all illegal aliens from Colombia returned from the United States, including on U.S. military aircraft.” (Per the New York Times, the U.S. government did make some concessions to Colombia by agreeing not to handcuff and photograph the deportees, and dispatching Homeland Security staffers, instead of military officers, as flight escorts.)
Meanwhile, Colombia’s foreign ministry insisted that it would grant the deportees “decent conditions as citizens subject to rights,” use the presidential air fleet to pick up deportees who would have otherwise become passengers on military planes (so as to “guarantee respect for the rights of citizens and to carry out medical monitoring if necessary”), and dispatch officials to Washington this week to iron out details with Trump.
Colombia isn’t the first nation to have materially countered Trump’s deportation plans. Still, its tiff with the U.S. is indicative of some lesser-known trade entanglements between North and South America—and of the potential for the Trump administration to hurt Americans’ pocketbooks in its craven pursuit of mass deportations.
The impact of the bout between the two nations was felt as it unfolded: a price spike for arabica coffee futures on the European markets (the U.S. receives 30 percent of its coffee supply from Colombia), heightened American fears that there wouldn’t be enough fresh-cut flowers (imported, overwhelmingly, from Colombia) stocked on store shelves in time for Valentine’s Day, and shake-ups in the markets for U.S. oil and corn exports. (Colombia takes in billions of dollars’ worth of both each year.)
As WLRN Public Media notes, Colombia is the United States’ 10th-largest trading partner by weight and “the largest country of origin for imports” processed through south Florida. Those include plenty of agricultural products, which have already proved to be a sore spot between the two nations; Colombia provoked American ire last year when it raised tariffs on U.S. milk powder and began an investigation into its northern neighbor’s lavish corn subsidies, sparking bipartisan worry that U.S. corn producers could lose an important customer.
But beyond trade relations, there’s the important fact that Colombia has long been the United States’ closest Latin American ally: The country is an eager partner in taking down drug traffickers in the region, and it serves as a liberal democratic counterpart to its authoritarian neighbor Venezuela. As such, the Trump–Petro spat is already provoking worries within Latin America more broadly.
On Thursday, all Latin American heads of state will meet for an “emergency summit” to discuss “migration, the environment and regional unity,” per the Financial Times. Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia will obviously be key players here, but so will Panama, whose government has been roiled by Trump’s repeated threats to “take back” the Panama Canal. Even before Joe Biden had left office, Petro and the presidents of Chile, Bolivia, and Mexico had banded together to assure that the canal would remain under Panamanian control.
Sure, Trump could continue to aim tariffs at these countries, but it wouldn’t be as easy to go after an entire bloc. As the Colombian writer Cruz Bonlarron Martínez points out in a Hill op-ed, Latin America and the Caribbean account for “21.3 percent of U.S. foreign trade, equal to over $1 trillion. … If the region consciously decided to look towards other trading partners, the U.S. economy would feel the effects, and not just in coffee prices.” The region as a whole constitutes “the world’s leading net food exporter,” according to the United Nations.
In addition, while the bulk of American imports hail from Mexico, the U.S. also receives essential products from specialist countries like Peru (berries and minerals), Chile (copper, which has particularly high global demand), Bolivia (manufacturing metals), Brazil (machine equipment), Guatemala (textiles), and the Dominican Republic (medical tech). These countries collectively hold a varied basket of goods that would pinch Americans’ pockets if they earned Trump’s tariffs treatment.
What’s more, these countries are also earning the support of far-flung allies. A Canadian ex-minister is calling for a strategic coalition between nations that have been attacked by Trump—including Mexico, Panama, and Denmark—and encouraging her country to publish a list of U.S. goods that would be affected by the tariffs Canada is already planning in retaliation to Trump (for example: machine components, chemicals, and energy). That planned strike-back has cross-partisan support among the U.S.’s northern neighbors.
So far, Latin American leaders have not been as aggressive with Trump as Petro was on Sunday, but they have been just as openly concerned over the human rights and dignified treatment of deported immigrants. Before the weekend’s incidents, leaders from Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico teamed up with seven regional neighbors to release a joint statement calling for a “humanistic approach” to deportations. Earlier this month, Honduras’ president had threatened to kick U.S. military officers out of her borders in response to “a hostile attitude of mass expulsion of our brothers.” And while Mexico has pledged to cooperate with repatriation efforts, it has ruled out any cooperation with the “Remain in Mexico” initiative that pushes asylum-seekers to remain south of the Rio Grande while waiting for an approval hearing that could take years to schedule. The country’s president has beefed up immigration-assistance infrastructure and already alluded to “a scheme in place in case there is any violation of the human rights of Mexicans who arrive in our country.” Those sentiments were only reinforced on Saturday, when leaders in Brazil’s government found out that the deportees the country was receiving from the U.S. had been shackled in handcuffs and denied basic necessities like drinkable water and bathroom access.
Here, then, is a firm commitment to the human rights of the Latin American diaspora, no matter what U.S. policy looks like. With this ramping up of regional alliances and international solidarity efforts, the region is already hinting that, indeed, it has a decent bit of economic leverage as a collective and will hardly rule it out if Trump—who has referred to Latin American immigrants as “poisoning the blood” of the U.S.—continues to treat immigrants as less than human. You can expect a lot of everyday essentials, from fruits to clothes to lifesaving machines, to become much pricier should Trump’s zeal for mass deportations be countered with further trade-warring from onetime allies.
We already saw, in Trump’s first term, what can happen when anti-immigrant zealots also dictate international economic policy—it severely upsets how American businesses expect to function and throws all prices and projections into chaos.