The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Colombia Avoids War with the US || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: January 16, 2026

Colombia looked like it was in the hot seat following Maduro's capture, but tensions seemed to have eased following a call between Trump and President Gustavo Petro.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://bit.ly/4qQRuDc

Everybody, Peter Zion here coming you from a snow day in Colorado. It is the 8th of January, and the news looks like the United States is not going to invade Colombia, so hooray. In the aftermath of the United States moving into Caracas with special forces and snagging Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, the Trump administration, Donald Trump himself, Rubio, who is the Secretary of State, Hegsov, who is a Secretary of Defense, and several others, all started opining openly about what the next steps would be. with topics like Cuba coming up.

And the president specifically brought up Columbia. Now, Columbia's president, Petro, and Trump, they just absolutely loathe one another. They're both populace, just one from the left and one from the right. And Trump has on multiple occasions accused Petro of being a drug lord, which of course is ridiculous. But, you know, we have a non-standard president here. And they have a non-standard president there. But yesterday,

apparently the two of them had a direct phone call for about an hour and it was all smiles and it ended with Trump actually inviting Petro to the White House to discuss issues of mutual concern. And you usually don't do that for someone you actually hate. Is there room for a deal to put it in Trump's parlous? Of course. Columbia has been the country in the Western Hemisphere that the United States has gotten along the best with for the last 60 years. and that's for a mix of reasons. So let's start with the strategic, then go down to the economics.

So strategically, it abuts Panama. It separates the Caribbean basin and the Atlantic from the Pacific. And as such, any sort of power based in Columbia has the opportunity of mucking around in both basins, just like the United States does. Because of the cocaine situation, the United States has worked with government after government after government in Bogota to try to contain the cocaine situation and tamp it down. The folks in Bogota have been thrilled for this because they don't much care for the cocaine either. The problem is it's a smuggling issue.

You see, Columbia is not like a normal country. It doesn't have a large chunk of flat land that the Colombians are from. Everyone lives on the sides of mountains so they can be high enough to be out of the tropics, but not so high they're up in the tundra. And this makes infrastructure very difficult, makes national unification rather difficult. and it means that if you're in an area that has the climate to grow cocaine, like Colombia has, you're always going to have an undercurrent of rebellion. That rebellion has traditionally identified itself as more leftist or even communists.

And so you've got cocaine communists, basically, that have been running around the country since the 1950s, and then their primary market is the United States. So Bogota doesn't like those people. The United States doesn't like those people, and there's always been that degree of alignment. Also, because Colombia has lived in a degree of civil war for the bulk of the last three quarters of a century, the population is significantly more conservative on security issues than anyone else in Latin America, because the rest of Latin America hasn't seen a real war in over a century. These are people who understand that guns are sometimes necessary.

As a result, they are the odd men out throughout Latin America, where you generally get more pendulum-like activities in their politics, swinging between the extreme right and the extreme left, not in a social sense like the way we think of it here in the United States, but in a land sense, people who own the land versus those who don't. That pulse is not nearly as strong in Colombia as it is everywhere else, and as a rule. And until very recently, it's been the center right that has ruled the country. And so, again, tends to get along better with the United States. More recently, economically, as part of a reward, a couple administrations go under George W. Bush, I believe,

decades-long cooperation with the United States was rewarded with a free trade agreement and the Colombians in bits and pieces are working on operationalizing that agreement. The reason it's been so slow is because there was a civil war and it really only ended about a decade ago and the country is really in the process now, today,

of defining what it wants to be in the future. But the fact that the hard work on the negotiations has already been done and there's already a free trade agreement in place bodes very, very well. The issue for our business, both sides and the opportunity is Mexico. Mexico has become so successful over the last 30 years because of NAFTA that it's moved up the value-added scale to the point that the Mexico of today

needs a low-cost manufacturing partner that looks a lot like Mexico in 1990. And that's exactly where Colombia is. So you've got a country with an above-average education level and worker quality for their income level, who now also has a trade deal with the United States. And basically, we're probably going to see if relations don't blow up in the next decade, is Columbia being formally or informally folded into the North American trading block, which is something that would benefit everybody hugely. Are there obstacles, of course? But if we get the politics, right, the obstacles are primarily geographic.

Like I said, most of the population of Columbia lives on the sides of mountains. That means building road and rail infrastructure is difficult. But a couple things to keep in mind. one of the few navigable rivers in the southern hemisphere is actually the magdalena which cuts right through the middle of that v so if columbians can snake down to that river they have then easy access to it and they can ship things out to the Caribbean basin into Houston and Miami beyond so there's a lot to work with and as the civil war is now over and we're entering a new phase of drug interdiction hopefully the Colombians and the Americans can continue to work with together. The current picture of the cocaine situation is undoubtedly a little ugly. The issue is that during the Civil War, the government couldn't fight everybody. So a lot of militias formed up that were loosely allied with the national government, while FARC, that's that leftist communist druggie thing, went a different direction and tried to basically run an independent state. Eventually,

FARC was disabled, disarmed, and is no longer really a factor. But then those right-wing paramilitaries that used to be allied with the government are now basically becoming their own insurgent groups and their own smuggling groups. So it's ironically allies of Bogota that Bogota once armed, that the United States once armed, that are now at the core of the drug problem. Doesn't mean it can't be combated, just means it has to be done differently.