When Colombia’s outspoken President Gustavo Petro took up a megaphone at a pro-Palestininan rally on the streets of New York to call on U.S. troops to disobey President Donald Trump, he must have anticipated a backlash.

“I ask all the soldiers of the United States not to point your guns at humanity,” Petro declared on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly on Friday. “Disobey Trump’s order.”

There are no U.S. troops directly engaged in the Israel-Gaza conflict and it was unclear what order Petro was referring to. Nevertheless, the State Department swiftly responded, revoking Petro’s U.S. visa for “reckless and incendiary actions.”

For Petro, that may have been the point.

The Colombian president has leveraged Trump’s aggressive policies at home and abroad to burnish his image of a leftist David confronting the U.S. Goliath, while the Trump administration has deepened its repudiation of a former close ally in Latin America in favor of ideologically aligned countries such as Argentina and Ecuador.

The dynamic reflects the region’s fraught interplay with a White House seemingly bent on picking winners and losers in the hemisphere, using immigration, anti-drug policies, sanctions and even bombs off the coast of Venezuela to try and achieve it.

Petro’s megaphone embodied his vocal anti-Trump posture. It’s shared but expressed with more restraint by Brazil’s president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, and Chile’s president, Gabriel Boric, both leftist leaders striving to maintain diverse international relations, including with U.S. adversary China, which is the biggest market for their commodities.

“Latin American leaders have responded to Trump in different ways, reflecting a mix of personal styles, economic interests and ideological positions,” said Evan Ellis, a Latin America professor at the U.S. Army War College who worked for then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Trump’s first term. In Petro’s case, the latest flare-up is “strategically incoherent and counterproductive for his country.”

Trump, by taking a hard-line stance against Petro and Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, is also playing to his political base, who has heard repeatedly from Trump that Latin America was “sending” its criminals, mentally ill people and drugs in an “invasion” of the U.S.

Petro and Lula headed to New York braced to spar with Trump. But while Lula didn’t hold back in his U.N. address just ahead of Trump’s, the Brazilian leader left New York with an unexpected souvenir. He and Trump met backstage, hit it off and will meet again next week.

Petro, who got a kiss on the forehead from Lula in the U.N. audience, took his criticism to the streets outside. And he left the city, stripped of his right to return. On Saturday, he was defiant, saying, “I don’t care” about the visa.

In Mexico, President Claudia Sheinbaum’s administration is ideologically averse to Trump, but she has maintained a moderate course, steered by the country’s deep economic ties to its northern neighbor, even levying tariffs on China and stepping up U.S. security cooperation.

In contrast, Argentina’s libertarian president, Javier Milei, has portrayed himself as Trump’s closest ally in the region. After a run on the peso sparked by a rout in a bellwether local election, Milei’s loyalty was rewarded this week with a U.S. pledge for a $20 billion financial lifeline that U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent overtly described as a “bridge” to crucial midterm elections later this month.

Risa Grais-Targow, a Latin America analyst at the New York think tank Eurasia Group, sees Latin America’s gamut of responses through a North-South lens. “Mexico and Central America are so integrated with the U.S. that they are generally capitulating, but South American leaders are clearly pushing back more, particularly Petro and Lula.”

“And from Trump’s side, I think we’re getting more clarity on what his version of the Monroe Doctrine looks like: major assistance for friends (Argentina), and an aggressive approach to your enemies (Venezuela, Colombia),” Grais-Targow said in a text exchange.

Trump’s confrontational approach to Latin America, which is still scarred by U.S. interventions before and during the Cold War, will be tested in a string of upcoming elections, including Chile’s first-round ballot on Nov. 16. Although the right is poised to make a comeback in several places, Argentina’s small but closely watched election shows that voters can swing the other way.

Take Brazil. After Trump imposed 50% tariffs on some Brazilian exports to retaliate for his ally Jair Bolsonaro’s criminal trial and later conviction, Lula’s star ascended. The 79-year-old former labor leader is now flirting with another run at the presidency next year.

In Ecuador’s case, President Daniel Noboa’s push for closer ties with the White House has brought only limited gains after he won reelection earlier this year. Another bout of protests over the government’s removal of diesel subsidies is simmering on the streets. The Trump administration has been coy toward Noboa’s offer to reopen an air base for the US military that would risk bringing the Pentagon into its bloody battle against drug gangs.

Smaller countries such as the Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago and oil-rich Guyana are firmly in the U.S. camp as well.

The shifting political winds are not lost on the Trump administration. After Petro’s fiery speech at the U.N. this week in which he called for Trump to be criminally investigated for U.S. strikes on boats allegedly running drugs from Venezuela, a senior State Department official said the administration is seeking to distinguish between Colombia’s leader and the institutions, military branches and businesses with which the U.S. has cooperated for decades. Petro is not eligible to run for reelection in 2026.

In Venezuela, the Trump administration has been reshaping its first-term “maximum pressure” sanctions that failed to dislodge Maduro into a high-profile military approach that’s so far targeted the small boats. An intervention would likely deepen the ideological cracks across the region.

The Pentagon deployment in the Caribbean offers “all the force the White House needs to provide a range of options” to strike land targets using ballistic or cruise missiles, Ellis said in a phone interview. “It’s difficult for me to see the president just walking away from this.”

(Eric Martin contributed to this report.)

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