Colombian President Gustavo Petro this week demanded that criminal charges be pursued against Donald Trump, whom he likened to Adolf Hitler in his remarks to the United Nations General Assembly.
Speaking in what was billed as his final address to the U.N. in New York on Tuesday, Petro noted (via a live U.N. translation) that global realities have shifted since his first U.N. appearance in 2022. He declared, “The old societies of Europe are collapsing,” and accused the United States of “applauding its new Hitler. It’s not listening to its own young people, or its older people who died in the battlefields of Europe, fighting against Hitler and against his criminal ideology. Today, the same thing is being done as Hitler did, building concentration camps for migrants, and it’s stated that migrants are of an inferior race, and they blame them just like Hitler blamed the Jews. They call them drug traffickers and thieves.”
In urging climate action, Petro asserted of Trump: “The most powerful man in the world does not believe in science. That is irrationality. And Germany, the country of great philosophers, of Kant, Feuerbach, and others, became prey of irrationalism in 1933, and today it’s this country that is becoming irrational. The solution is to stop consuming fossil fuels and to quickly switch to water, wind, hydrogen.” He also charged Trump with being “an accomplice to genocide” in Gaza. “This forum,” Petro said of the U.N., “is a mute witness to a genocide, in a world where we thought that this was something only a legacy of Hitler.”
Describing what he called “a kind of stone age” now upon all humanity, he decried inaction on climate issues, Trump’s military actions against “unarmed young people in the Caribbean,” Israeli strikes that “have killed some 70,000 people in Gaza,” and “the persecution, imprisonment, and expulsion of millions of migrants.”
Petro dismissed Trump’s justification that the U.S. bombed Venezuelan boats on the grounds of drug trafficking. “They said that the missiles in the Caribbean were used to stop drug trafficking,” Petro said. “That is a lie.” He went on: “There should be criminal cases against those officials of the United States for doing this, including the utmost official, President Trump,” noting these strikes targeted young people “who were simply trying to escape poverty”—who “might have had a certain amount of drugs,” he added, “but were not drug traffickers.”
Strikingly, Petro observed that the U.S. mainstream media have mostly overlooked his remarks.
