When Tariffs Became a Baton: A Caribbean Strike, Two Presidents, and a Country Caught in the Crossfire
There are moments when diplomacy gives way to theater — when a single sentence, uttered amid the clack of notebook pens and the drone of an airplane, can redraw the map of a relationship between nations. On board Air Force One, flanked by reporters and the pale wash of cabin lights, President Donald Trump did just that: he announced tariff hikes on Colombia and said plainly, “I’m stopping all payments to Colombia.”
The words landed like a stone in a pond that was already rippling. For weeks, the Caribbean Sea — its blue expanse a ribbon between islands and mainland — has been the scene of a deadly tit-for-tat: US forces striking vessels suspected of ferrying illicit narcotics, and Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, denouncing what he calls extrajudicial shootings of ordinary people. The latest exchange between Washington and Bogotá has pushed that feud into a new, feverish phase.
A strike, a statement, and competing narratives
On X (formerly Twitter), Secretary of War Pete Hegseth posted that US forces had destroyed a vessel in the USSOUTHCOM area of responsibility and that three people were killed. He further asserted that the ship was tied to Colombia’s leftist National Liberation Army (ELN), painting it as part of an illicit narcotics smuggling operation.
Colombian President Petro responded with a different script. “That boat belonged to a humble family, not a rebel group,” he wrote back on X, his words tinged with the indignation of a head of state defending sovereignty and the humanity of his citizens. “Mr. Trump, Colombia has never been rude to the United States … but you are rude and ignorant to Colombia.”
Both sides are staking claims to the truth. The Pentagon, for its part, refrained from adding detail beyond Hegseth’s post.
Lives at sea: more than just headlines
Ask people in the coastal towns and the answers are granular, immediate, and human. In a small port village on Colombia’s northern coast, a woman who asked to be identified as Ana — her hands rough from rope and salt — described the fear that has settled over fishing communities.
“We wake at dawn and look at the horizon like we are expecting both the fish and the bomb,” she said. “Who will tell us if the boat they take for a cartel ship is my brother’s?”
Another fisherman, José Ruiz, remembered a cousin who sailed for a living. “We are poor people. We have no cartel colors. We have nets and kids,” he said. “This is how war reaches the least among us.”
Human-rights groups and legal experts say the U.S. strikes — which independent monitoring groups allege have killed dozens in recent months — raise serious legal and ethical questions about the use of force in international waters, the standard of evidence for such strikes, and the accountability mechanisms that follow.
Statistics that complicate the story
To understand why Washington asserts such a muscular approach, look at the broader numbers: coca cultivation in Colombia has surged since the mid-2010s, swelling into hundreds of thousands of hectares across different regions — a trend tracked and verified by international agencies. The result is not only a booming illicit industry but also a patchwork of armed groups and criminal networks profiting from the trade. In September, the Trump administration listed Colombia among several countries it said had “failed demonstrably” to uphold counternarcotics commitments.
And yet, counter-narcotics policies alone do not erase decades of distrust. Colombia, once among the largest recipients of U.S. foreign aid in the Western Hemisphere, saw flows shift dramatically this year after USAID — the government’s traditional channel for humanitarian assistance — was shuttered. Against that backdrop, a presidential announcement to halt “all payments” is not merely symbolic; it could bite into health programs, agricultural support, and post-conflict initiatives that communities depend on.
From visas to tariffs: a catalogue of strains
The current rupture has a recent history. Earlier this year, the United States revoked President Petro’s visa after he joined a pro-Palestinian demonstration in New York and urged U.S. soldiers to consider conscience in the face of presidential orders. The diplomatic frost only deepened after reports that U.S. strikes in the Caribbean had taken Colombian lives — an allegation Washington has sometimes denied and at other times presented as part of its counternarcotics campaign.
Colombia currently pays a baseline 10% tariff on most imports into the United States, a figure President Trump has applied to multiple countries. Announcing he would increase tariffs on Colombian goods, Trump framed the move as both punitive and preventive: a response to what he called Bogotá’s complicity in the drug trade. “They don’t have a fight against drugs — they make drugs,” he told reporters. The bluntness of the accusation has been viewed in Bogotá as not just inflammatory but personally insulting to the nation and its president.
Sovereignty, power, and the politics of enforcement
There is a philosophical rift running beneath the headlines. On one side sits a doctrine that prizes deterrence and unilateral action: if illicit narcotics cross the sea, the vessel should be struck. On the other side is a cry for due process and respect for national sovereignty: striking a ship that belongs to citizens of another nation without coordination or transparent evidence is an affront to law and life.
“It’s not just about drugs,” said Mariana López, a human-rights lawyer in Bogotá. “It’s about how powerful states use force—and how the people most affected are never those making policy in Washington. Accountability is the difference between targeted law enforcement and an international incident.”
Analysts point out that the war on drugs has increasingly become a geopolitical instrument. Tariffs are a form of economic leverage; revoking aid is a blunt tool of punishment. But these levers reverberate through markets and communities in ways that rarely align neatly with political aims.
What happens next?
Colombia’s foreign ministry has vowed to seek international support, framing the U.S. accusations as an attack on the dignity of its president and the autonomy of the Colombian people. Legal challenges, appeals to multilateral organizations, and a public campaign to win hearts and minds are all likely to be part of Bogotá’s playbook.
For ordinary Colombians, though, the calculus is simpler and sharper: will these diplomatic blows make their lives safer or more precarious? Will tariffs raise consumer prices? Will aid cuts disrupt clinics and social programs? Will fishermen feel the sea is a place of livelihood or danger?
And for readers around the globe: what do we want international security to look like in an age of transnational threats? Is a world where powerful militaries strike across borders, guided by suspicion and limited transparency, one we can accept? Or must the norms that govern interstate behavior evolve so that human rights and rule of law are not collateral in the pursuit of security?
Conclusion: a fragile calm, and questions that won’t go away
The sea is as indifferent to politics as it is to borders, but the consequences of decisions made on solid ground race across its surface like wavelets. Colombia and the United States now stand at a fraught juncture: one of diplomacy, legal contestation, and human pain. Between the two capitals, there are communities whose names never make headlines yet whose futures may turn on decisions announced on a press deck tens of thousands of feet above the earth.
These are the human stakes hiding behind tariff percentages and terse X posts. When the ink dries on new policies, when courts deliberate and diplomats negotiate, it will be the fishermen, the families, the human-rights activists, and the small-town mayors who feel the reverberations most keenly. Their voices — anxious, resolute, incredulous — deserve more than a statistic. They deserve a reckoning.
