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White House Press Pool Reports @WHPressPool - Backgrounder: President Gustavo Petro’s Visit to the White House
Good morning,
My name is Cristobal Vasquez, and I am your foreign pooler for the visit of Colombian President Gustavo Petro Urrego to the White House. The bilateral meeting in the Oval Office is scheduled to begin at 11:00 a.m. and is currently closed to the press; however, this remains subject to change.
Following the meeting, President Petro will hold a news conference at the Colombian Embassy in D.C. The briefing is scheduled to start at 3:30 p.m. This is the first time President Gustavo Petro and President Donald Trump have met in person.
The Colombian delegation includes:
Rosa Yolanda Villavicencio , Minister of Foreign Relations
Pedro Arnulfo Sánchez Suárez , Minister of Defense
Aramando Benedetti, Minister of Interior
Ricardo Roa, President of Ecopetrol, Colombia’s state owned company.
René Guarín, director of the National Intelligence Directorate
Gloria Miranda, director of the illicit crop substitution program in Colombia
Agenda - Talking Points
Ahead of the meeting, on Jan. 23, Colombian Foreign Minister Rosa Yolanda Villavicencio Mapy and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio held a call to prepare for the visit.
According to a statement (https://x.com/ColombiaEmbUSA/status/2014731848597819735?s=20) published by the Colombian government, topics for discussion reportedly include regional security cooperation, counternarcotics efforts (specifically the fight against transnational organized crime in border areas), and shared economic opportunities.
Colombian officials view the visit as a strategic opening to demonstrate the effectiveness of their counternarcotics initiatives to a skeptical White House.
According to leaked information from El País (https://english.elpais.com/international/2025-11-18/3000-tons-of-cocaine-the-controversial-figure-that-pits-colombia-against-the-united-nations.html#:~:text=The%20cocaine%20production%20figure%2C%20which,were%20potentially%20produced%20in%202024.) regarding the latest UNODC figures (to be included in the World Drug Report 2025 (https://unodc.org/documents/data