WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump met for nearly two hours with Colombian President Gustavo Petro at the White House on Tuesday, conducting a friendly face-to-face mere weeks after threatening military action against the South American country and accusing the leader of pumping cocaine into the United States.

Trump said afterward that he and Petro hadn’t been “the best of friends,” suggesting that he’d felt insulted by the president of Colombia because he didn’t know him and because the two had never met.

Afterward, he’d changed his mind, saying, “We had a very good meeting. I thought he was terrific.”

Trump said the pair discussed cooperation in counternarcotics operations and a number of other topics.

The meeting followed Trump saying Petro — who has continued to criticize Trump and the U.S. operation to capture Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro — has become more willing to work with his administration to stem the flow of illegal drugs from Colombia.

The good feelings seemed to be mutual.

Petro posted on X a picture of Trump’s book “The Art of the Deal,” with a signed inscription reading, “You are great.” Colombia’s president wrote, ironically, in Spanish, “What did Trump mean to say to me with this dedication? I don’t understand English very well.”

Petro also said in an interview with Colombia’s Caracol Radio that he asked Trump to help mediate an escalating trade war between his country and Ecuador.

Still, past bad blood continues to loom. Indeed, in the days prior to Tuesday’s meeting, Petro, a leftist politician, continued to poke at the conservative U.S. president, calling Trump an “accomplice to genocide” in the Gaza Strip, while asserting that the capture of Maduro was a kidnapping.

And ahead of his departure for Washington, Petro called on Colombians to take to the streets of Bogotá during the White House meeting. He plans to hold a news conference at the Colombian Embassy in Washington later Tuesday.

Petro brought along Foreign Relations Minister Rosa Yolanda Villavicencio, Defense Minister Pedro Arnulfo Sánchez Suárez and Ambassador Daniel García-Peña, while Trump was joined by Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, who was born in Colombia.

Just minutes before the meeting started, Petro, in a video shared by his office, described himself as a politician who has denounced and prosecuted drug traffickers.

Accompanied by one of his daughters and his granddaughter, he lamented that most of his children live outside of Colombia, in exile, due to the fight he’s waging against drug trafficking. “We have truly suffered its effects directly,” Petro said.