Trump keeps Colombia decertified and takes Venezuela off the same list

President Donald Trump on 16 September kept Colombia on the list of countries that have “demonstrably failed” their international counternarcotics duties. He removed Venezuela from that failure category in the same determination. The review window runs from September 2025 to September 2026. Abelardo de la Espriella took office in August. Almost the entire year under review belongs to Gustavo Petro.

Decertification in this sense is a presidential finding under US drug law, not a UN listing. It can restrict some security aid. It is also a political stamp. Colombia had stayed off the failure list for 28 years before Trump put it on in September 2025. One year later it is still there.

The White House said the Colombian public had elected De la Espriella and that the new president had promised an aggressive campaign against coca and cocaine. Trump said he would consider lifting the failure label if those promises turn into eradication numbers and into the dismantling of what Washington calls narcoterrorist networks. The State Department’s language was cooler. Commitments were noted. They were not treated as results.

Bogotá’s reply

The Colombian foreign ministry said the finding measures a year that ended as the new government began. It said De la Espriella had, from the first day, moved to restore state authority and to confront trafficking and transnational crime, and it pointed to arrests and seizures in the first month. That is a calendar argument. Twelve months of Petro, four weeks of De la Espriella, and a finding that does not split the year.

For the fiscal year that starts in October, Colombia shares the failure class with Afghanistan, Myanmar and Bolivia in one official framing of the majors list. Broader US documents still name a longer set of countries of concern. The operational fact for Bogotá is narrower. It has twelve months to produce a different finding in September 2027.

Why Venezuela came off

Venezuela’s removal sits next to the Houston energy meetings of the same week. PDVSA signed an MOU with Continental Resources. US firms are being waved into oil and gold. A country cannot sit in the failure box and in the reconstruction prospectus at the same time without someone noticing the join. The determination solves that join by taking Caracas off the demonstrable-failure line while leaving Bogotá on it.

Coca cultivation and cocaine output in Colombia rose through the Petro years on the international estimates Washington prefers to cite. Petro argued that seizures were up and that forced eradication had failed before. De la Espriella was elected on a different theory of the same problem. Trump is now telling him to prove the new theory inside a year.

What the finding actually changes

Some US assistance tied to certification can be withheld. A national interest waiver can put part of it back. The larger effect is diplomatic. Colombia has been the central US security partner in northern South America for a generation. A second year on the failure list tells every other capital that the partnership is now conditional on crop numbers, not on history.

It also tells De la Espriella what Washington will measure. Not speeches. Hectares and networks. The president has already said he will look again if those two lines move. September 2027 is the date on which that sentence becomes another finding.