Socialist president refuses to accommodate orange one’s knee-jerk deportations of Colombian citizens, says will arrange civilian flights and full respect for human rights
Colombia’s president Gustavo Petro has demonstrated he will not grovel to the petulance and bullying of US president Donald Trump this evening, hitting US imports into Colombia with a 50% import tariff.
Trump had tried to summarily deport Colombian migrants on military flights – without clearing them for arrival in Colombia first – and Petro’s government refused to allow them to land, insisting instead that the victims of Trump’s fascism be treated with ‘full dignity and respect for human rights’. Trump responded, unsurprisingly, with a knee-jerk show of petulance, announcing a 25% tariff on imports from Colombia, ordering punitive escalated searches on Colombians flying into the US and demanding banking sanctions against members of Petro’s party.
Petro responded by putting an immediate 25% tariff onto US imports and said he will increase it to 50% if Trump escalates. Petro also ordered civilian flights for Colombian citizens with a guarantee of dignified treatment and respect for their rights – and called both for Colombians around the world to promote the countries exports and on other South American governments to meet to discuss a unified response to Trump’s posturing and bullying, saying that Trump’s economic and diplomatic ‘blockade’ doesn’t scare him.
And it looks like Petro may get his wish, as other countries in the region begin to announce their own responses.
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They elected the one who looks like he’s drank far too much Sunny D because their grocery prices were too high.
Now they’re gonna pay a lot more for their coffee.
Booooooooo!!!
It appears Petro has relented.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c20p36e62gyo
New name for him. Petro-Dollar. 😕
“If you make a place uninhabitable and refuse to rush massive amounts of aid to its people, so they can live, you are forcing them to re-locate as surely as if you had done so at gunpoint. The choice to relocate or starve is no choice at all.
Caitlin johnson: Australian journalist.
Whilst Johnson is very definitely referencing Gaza – and by extension other nearby places such as Libya, Syria, Lebanon et al. – the method – bombing back to the stone age and genocide – is just one of the two methods by which the demand side of that relocation in the form of refugee/immigration supply is generated.
The other being deliberately preventing the economic development of other peoples and countries by exporting surplus capital to repatriate super profits via plundering the resources and economy those populations rely on to survive, never mind thrive.
And this is what the West, chiefly the USA has been doing for centuries. In recent times by using US controlled and owned International bodies and institutions such as the IMF and World Bank, among others, to make punitive loans with strings attached which limits the ability of the target economy to grow for the benefit of the populations who live there.
And as a result of the economy not being allowed to grow – because such an outcome would be “a threat to US national security” in a context in which only a zero-sum outcome in favour of the “USA” (i.e. its ruling class of oligarch’s) is permitted – the loans cannot be paid and the strings in the form of privatisation of the entire economy, its resources, and productive capacity is seized – often using local comprador elites as is happening now in Europe.
Leaving the vast majority of the populace pauperized without sufficient – and in many cases’ no – access to basic resources such as water, energy, food, etc. All the necessaries which occupy the bottom level of Marlow’s hierarchy of needs.
And to be totally blunt, the constant whining about the impact of this in producing a relocation of those pauperized to the point of needing to relocate to survive as a result of the policies of the Western ruling class of oligarch’s is getting somewhat tiresome.
Life is a two-way street. It’s about reciprocation and quid pro quo. Cut the demand side of that supply, and you go a long way to resolving that inadequately defined “problem” of “immigration” which is really a relocation problem generated by deliberate policy of elected politicians in the US and the rest of the West who talk a good talk about “standing on our own two feet” but whose consistent beggar-my-neigbour policies and actions – which Trump, along with the rest of the TINA model adherents of the one true faith across the Collective Worst are continuing to pursue (“I win – you lose”, like Trum/Starmer et al, along with those who support these contradictory policies which result in such outcomes, are still at the level of the infant school playground).
As matters stand, the whole Trump/MAGA/US/Western approach is one which wants to have its cake and to eat it. To be able to continue pursing such numpty level policies of easy plunder, rather than stand on their own two feet whilst whinging like mardy arsed five-year-olds about the inevitable outcomes (‘immigration’) and consequences. To have it not just both ways, but every which way.
As Trump is known for liking “deals” the Columbians should – along with everyone else affected (which is an increasing majority of humanity) – have obliged by offering a quid pro quo deal along the lines of;
We will take back those who have relocated to survive as a result of your beggar-my-neighbour numpty infantile approach in return for you following a grown up approach to reality by reversing your approach from zero-sum to non-zero sum.
Because the rate of decline of the UK and European economies along with the collapsing industrial base arising from a combination of hubris, incompetence, ignorance and arrogance it won’t be too long before the boats across the channel and the Med will be going in the opposite direction.
Forgot to list the subservience (to Washington) of the Euro/UK comprador ‘elite’ (sic) in that final paragraph.