(Adnkronos) – Zohran Mamdani was forced to cancel the meeting, scheduled for this week in New York, with Gustavo Petro, the outgoing left-wing Colombian president who accuses the Trump administration of interference in the elections which saw the surprising exploit of far-right candidate Abelardo de la Espriella in the first round of the presidential elections.
According to what the Washington Post reveals today, the Colombian government itself confidentially canceled the engagement after a meeting between its officials and American diplomats in Bogotá, during which the State Department recalled that a trip by Petro, who is subject to US sanctions, would have been unacceptable, a message that was interpreted by the Colombians as a threat to arrest the president if he entered American territory.
The United States imposed sanctions against Petro, an economist with a distant past in the ranks of a guerrilla movement, after his statements last year criticizing US support for the war in Gaza and imploring American soldiers to disobey any orders to kill.
“A visa is a privilege, not a right,” a State Department official told the Post, adding that “anyone’s visa is at risk of revocation if they outrageously ask American military personnel to disobey orders from the elected president of the United States.”
The meeting with Mamdani had been included in Petro’s New York travel program to participate in the UN Security Council meeting, for which Colombia holds the rotating presidency in June. Despite the revocation of his US visa, the Colombian president retains the right to travel to New York to go to the Glass Palace. He was supposed to have a private conversation with Mamdani, followed by a public event where left-wing leaders would discuss democracy in the West.
