The Colombian city of Santa Marta, a Caribbean resort with scorching sun, white sand beaches and packed with tourists, hosts this Sunday the fourth summit of leaders of the European Union (EU) and the 33 countries of the The world has changed since the last meeting, held in Brussels in 2023 after eight years, and proof of this is that the list of absentees is larger than that of those present. The arrival to power of Donald Trump has dynamited the consensus that ordered the world for the last 80 years. The Santa Marta summit sought to be the ideal setting to open doors to a new order, but it is unlikely that that will happen. If a dozen Latin American presidents and a good part of European presidents attended the meeting two years ago, this weekend’s call barely reaches a dozen out of a total of 60.
The Government of Colombia has been denouncing the pressure from the White House for days to reduce the list of attendees to a minimum. “They tried to sabotage these meetings,” Petro said this Saturday, “they told the prime ministers of the Caribbean islands not to come, to leave me alone, and also to the presidents of the continental Latin American republics.” Trump’s shadow goes far beyond a simple diplomatic game against CELAC, born in Mexico in 2011, a time of rise of progressive Latin American governments, as an OAS without the United States. Santa Marta is a hundred kilometers from the area chosen by Washington to deploy its proclamation towards the United States from the coasts of Venezuela and Colombia. There are already 18 vessels that have been blown up under US fire during the last two months, with a death toll of 69.
On the Latin American side, the only important figures in Santa Marta will be the host, Gustavo Petro, and the Brazilian Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who, to the despair of the Colombian Foreign Ministry, . The regional progressive axis is very weakened. The Chilean Gabriel Boric is a week away from the vote where his successor will be chosen, and countries like Bolivia and Argentina are now in the hands of the right. The Mexican Claudia Sheinbaum declined the invitation. Not even all the presidents of Mercosur will be there, except Lula, despite the fact that the signing of the bloc’s agreement with the EU is expected on December 20, as both parties eagerly expect. The leftist Yamandú Orsi dropped out at the last minute due to logistical problems and the Paraguayan Santiago Peña will not be in the game. The Venezuela-Nicaragua-Cuba axis will barely send second-line personalities and Peru is undergoing an accelerated change of Government.
The losses should not be surprising. CELAC brings together nations of all sizes and interests, from the small English-speaking island nations of the Caribbean to a giant like Brazil. Furthermore, the cohesion between governments as diverse as that of Nicolás Maduro and that of makes it difficult to achieve consensus in a community that lacks its own institutional framework like that of the EU. It is a scenario very prone to external pressures.
On the EU side, meanwhile, the president of the Council, António Costa, will travel to Santa Marta. At the last minute, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, gave up, even though she had planned it on her agenda and was in Brazil to participate in the climate summit organized by Lula. There will also be the Spanish Pedro Sánchez, who has experienced quite an odyssey to arrive.
Sánchez traveled from Belém, but had to take a military plane to travel from Barranquilla to Santa Marta because the officer could not land at the local airport due to the size of the runway, something that has undoubtedly put off other presidents, reports Carlos E. Cué from Santa Marta. Sánchez has traveled to demonstrate his commitment to the relationship between the EU and CELAC and try not to lose influence in a continent increasingly controlled by Trump and the turn of governments towards the extreme right. The Spanish leader is putting pressure on the EU, especially on the Frenchman Emmanuel Macron, with the help of Lula, to sign the EU-Mercosur agreement now. But he does not want to clash directly with Trump, and at the press conference on Friday in Brazil he avoided criticizing his military threats against Venezuela. All his gestures and his alliance with Lula are in line with proposing an alternative from the left to the imperial world drawn by the president of the United States.
In this sense, the Summit agenda does not hold any big surprises: defense of multilateralism, trade and investment at a time when the world is moving forward gripped by the tariff war launched by Trump. They will also talk about ecological and digital transitions, joint fight against organized crime, corruption, drug trafficking and human trafficking. He has made it clear that he intends for the drug boat crisis to also be on the table. The meeting, he said at a press conference during the COP30 held in Belém, “only makes sense if we discuss this issue of American warships in the seas of Latin America.”
The same spirit moves Petro, who receives the summit at a very particular moment in his foreign relations. Colombia has been an unconditional ally of the United States for decades, a great recipient of its military aid and the support of its failed war on drugs. Petro has now marked clear distances from Trump. Although the breakup has been maintained in almost personal terms — the American has said that the Colombian is a “thug” who “produces a lot of drugs,” and has included him in the so-called Clinton List, a catalog of people sanctioned by the Treasury — the shift is broader.
Since before Trump came to power, the first left-wing president of recent Colombia has expanded diplomatic horizons, with the opening of embassies in African countries, the greater commitment to south-south cooperation or a recent tour of Arab nations. The announcement, last May, that Colombia was joining the investment program of the Chinese New Silk Road, is another example.
In 2023, after the summit in Brussels, it was already known that Colombia would hold the presidency of the organization and would serve as host in 2025. What was not known was that Trump would be re-elected. Nor was it clear which city would host the heads of state, a function that Bogotá, its capital, usually fulfills in the South American country; Cartagena de Indias, the colonial tourist city on the shores of the Caribbean Sea; or Medellin. Petro preferred Santa Marta, which this year commemorates 500 years of foundation by the first Spanish colonizers and has sought to position itself as symbols of the meeting of Indo-American, Afro-Iberian and Iberian cultures. Santa Marta is also where the liberator Simón Bolívar died in 1830. With fewer transport connections than other cities, it now hosts not only the summit of heads of state and chancellors, but also parallel events on cultural, economic and social issues that have revolutionized the resort.
