Relations between the Trump administration and Colombia took their fourth turn for the worse this year over the weekend, after President Donald Trump threatened steep new tariffs on a free-trade partner and said he would suspend U.S. aid and assistance to one of its key Latin American allies.

The punitive steps, announced Sunday, came after Colombian President Gustavo Petro again criticized the ongoing and legally dubious U.S. military attacks on civilian small craft in the Caribbean, ostensibly part of the Trump administration’s war on drug trafficking. Just after Trump’s announcement, Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth announced another U.S. strike, this time on what he claimed was a boat crewed by Colombian guerrillas carrying narcotics.

Relations between the Trump administration and Colombia took their fourth turn for the worse this year over the weekend, after President Donald Trump threatened steep new tariffs on a free-trade partner and said he would suspend U.S. aid and assistance to one of its key Latin American allies.

The punitive steps, announced Sunday, came after Colombian President Gustavo Petro again criticized the ongoing and legally dubious U.S. military attacks on civilian small craft in the Caribbean, ostensibly part of the Trump administration’s war on drug trafficking. Just after Trump’s announcement, Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth announced another U.S. strike, this time on what he claimed was a boat crewed by Colombian guerrillas carrying narcotics.

“President Gustavo Petro, of Colombia, is an illegal drug leader strongly encouraging the massive production of drugs,” Trump wrote on his social media platform Sunday, vowing to cut off the trickle of U.S. assistance that still reaches the country.

The problem is that cutting already-slashed levels of U.S. development and counternarcotics assistance for Colombia will make it harder for Bogotá to achieve its own goals of rural development that could provide licit economic alternatives to mushrooming coca production. (Colombia is the source of about 97 percent of all the cocaine in the United States, and the United Nations estimates the country is producing near-record crops.) Historically, the biggest chunk of U.S. assistance for Colombia has come in the form of counternarcotics and law-enforcement support, followed by development assistance and economic support to help diversify Colombia’s economy.

“If the U.S. were truly interested in countering drug trafficking, the last thing you would do is to alienate the one military in the region” that has the capability to take the fight to the drug traffickers, said Elizabeth Dickinson, the senior analyst for Colombia at the International Crisis Group. “It’s totally illogical.”

But it’s not even clear right now how much U.S. assistance Trump would be freezing. The Biden administration had sought more than $400 million for the country for fiscal year 2024, but Congress appropriated slightly less than that for both that year and fiscal 2025, which just concluded. But the Trump administration earlier this year also slashed U.S. Agency for International Development funding, including for Colombia. Estimates of U.S. assistance to Colombia this year were about one-quarter to one-half of the recent amounts, or between $100 million and $200 million or so.

In any event, it’s not the pure amounts that matter—as Dickinson said, these are not top-offs to the Colombian defense budget. Rather, they are long-term investments the United States has made at enhancing interoperability and the capabilities of the Colombian armed forces.

“It would destroy defense relationships, and leave the Colombian military without a lot of its functionality. You would cripple a lot of what they need to fight organized crime and drugs,” she said.

The other punitive step taken by the Trump administration was to threaten additional U.S. import duties on Colombia, a reprise of similar threats made during the first weeks of Trump’s second term, when Petro initially refused to accept U.S. deportation flights. It is unclear under what legal authority Trump may seek to levy additional tariffs on Colombia. It would not be under the national security exception, which in any event are for sector-specific tariffs, such as the steel and aluminum tariffs that already apply to Colombia—though Trump might argue that drug flows constitute a national emergency (like persistent trade deficits) that underpinned his global tariffs earlier this year; his tariffs on Canada and Mexico for fentanyl trade invoked that Carter-era legislation. (All of Trump’s uses of economic emergencies to levy tariffs have been struck down by the courts; the Supreme Court will hear the administration’s appeal next month.)

The stiffer new tariffs would come on top of the existing 10 percent tariffs that nearly all countries in the world face, even though Colombia has a free-trade agreement with the United States. The United States is Colombia’s biggest single trading partner—the two countries have bilateral trade of about $55 billion a year. That gives Trump’s tariffs some potential leverage, but the main U.S. imports of Colombian goods include oil, coffee, flowers, and cacao, meaning the pain will be felt as much by U.S. consumers as by Colombian exporters.

Those measures, too, would fly in the face of both Colombian and U.S. efforts to foster alternative agricultural endeavors to coca cultivation. 

“There is nothing that competes with coca cultivation for small farmers except coffee and cacao,” said Dickinson, who noted that both could now face shrinking opportunities in their biggest market.

After that early tariff fight, relations further soured in September, when Trump “decertified” Colombia as a reliable U.S. partner on counternarcotics, the first such decertification of Colombia in nearly 30 years. The administration later announced waivers that avoided most automatic aid cuts, but those have now been suspended anyway. Suspending even diminished levels of U.S. assistance, said some advocacy groups such as the Washington Office on Latin America, would empower violent criminals and harm innocent Colombians, perversely creating more incentives to enter the drug trade.

Tensions sank even further in late September, when the Trump administration revoked Petro’s U.S. visa after he addressed the U.N. General Assembly and criticized U.S. strikes on small craft near Colombia’s shores. Petro also particularly angered the administration with remarks at a pro-Palestinian protest in New York where he urged U.S. troops to disobey orders.

On Monday, Colombia said it had recalled its ambassador to the United States in response to the latest escalation.

Petro took office in 2022 as the head of Colombia’s first modern left-wing government, and sought to reverse decades of “forced eradication,” a controversial program meant to minimize acreage dedicated to coca cultivation. The decline in eradication measures coincided with a rise in coca cultivation in Colombia, a point the Trump administration underscored in its September decision to decertify the country as a reliable counternarcotics partner. But the Petro government is currently embroiled in a battle with narco-traffickers in rural areas of the country, the most intense in a decade, and a fall in U.S. assistance will exacerbate an already dire security situation.

The decline in U.S.-Colombian relations is especially noteworthy for a major non-NATO U.S. ally, and at a time of heightened regional tension, as the United States has positioned about 10,000 troops and multiple warships and aircraft in the Caribbean, and made threatening overtures against the Venezuelan regime of Nicolás Maduro. 

“What this grandstanding has been doing is throw all those ties out the window, throw decades of cooperation and investment away,” Dickinson said. If the latest measures are not walked back, she said, they will “have a dramatic fallout.”