Colombian President Gustavo Petro delivered his final speech at the United Nations in New York on Tuesday, and it was anything but soft on Donald Trump. In remarks that drew global attention, Petro compared the former U.S. president to Adolf Hitler and accused him of fueling policies that echo some of history’s darkest moments.
“The old societies of Europe are collapsing,” Petro said, according to the U.N.’s live translation. “And the United States is 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”, reported Yahoo.
Petro tied his criticism of Trump to his broader plea for urgent climate action. “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.”
The Colombian leader didn’t stop there. He accused Trump of being “an accomplice to genocide” in Gaza. “This forum is a mute witness to a genocide, in a world where we thought that this was something only a legacy of Hitler.”
Earlier in his speech, Petro warned that “a kind of stone age” had fallen on humanity. He pointed to climate inaction, U.S. strikes on “unarmed young people in the Caribbean,” Israeli airstrikes that he said killed “some 70,000 people in Gaza,” and the “persecution, imprisonment, and expulsion of millions of migrants.”
He also directly rejected Trump’s claim that Venezuelans killed in a recent U.S. bombing in the Caribbean were drug traffickers. “They said that the missiles in the Caribbean were used to stop drug trafficking,” Petro argued. “That is a lie.”
According to Petro, the people targeted by those strikes were poor migrants fleeing poverty, not traffickers. “There should be criminal cases against those officials of the United States for doing this, including the utmost official, President Trump, that allowed the shooting of missiles against these young people who were simply trying to escape poverty”—young people who “might have had a certain amount of drugs,” he admitted, but “were not drug traffickers.”
By the end of his remarks, Petro had painted a grim picture of a world repeating its worst mistakes, with Trump at the center of his warnings. His sharp words are already rippling through international politics, fueling fierce debate about how far he went in comparing Trump to one of history’s most infamous dictators.