When US president Donald Trump hurled abuse at Colombia’s president Gustavo Petro last month, branding him a ‘sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States’, it was strikingly audacious. Trump leant into bombastic provocation: there is no evidence to suggest Petro himself makes cocaine. And yet, Trump’s claim didn’t come as a shock – the two leaders have spent the past year locked in a volley of barbs with one another.

Petro, Colombia’s first left-wing leader, likes to fire back with ideological, often sermonising lectures on imperialism and US hypocrisy. But tangled up in the rancorous exchanges – many of them about drugs – is a stubborn fact: Colombia is the world’s largest producer of cocaine. With the US a primary destination for the drug, Trump wants less of it to be produced and fewer drugs in general to cross the border into America. It is this issue which is likely to dominate when these two unpredictable, ideologically opposed leaders meet in Washington today.

Perhaps an exchange in person rather than online or in speeches will dampen the verbal fireworks between Trump and Petro – or they could explode into an eccentric display of political theatrics. Whatever the outcome of today’s meeting in the White House, and even if they emerge declaring themselves newfound amigos, Petro cannot give Trump what he wants. Colombia’s cocaine production will not stop anytime soon – and neither will the flow of drugs to the........

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