A minor travel hiccup has reignited a major legal debate in Colombia. When airline Avianca canceled two tickets booked by former President Gustavo Petro, and separately, questions surfaced about his efforts to buy a home in La Calera, a wealthy area outside Bogotá, Colombians began asking how far the sanctions imposed on him by the United States Treasury actually reach.
Petro was sanctioned earlier this year by the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), a designation typically used against people accused of drug trafficking, corruption, or other serious offenses. Being placed on this list generally freezes any assets the individual holds under US jurisdiction and bars American citizens and companies from doing business with them.
But according to legal experts, the sanctions don’t work like a blanket ban that prevents Petro from buying a plane ticket or a house in Colombia. What they do is create a strong deterrent: banks, airlines, and other companies—especially those with any tie to the US financial system—tend to avoid transactions with a sanctioned person altogether, fearing they themselves could face penalties or lose access to US banking channels.
That chilling effect helps explain why a routine flight booking or a home sale can suddenly become legally fraught, even in Colombia, far from US soil. For the full breakdown of what Petro can and cannot legally do, read the original report at El Tiempo.
Source: ¿Qué puede comprar Gustavo Petro y qué riesgo corre quien negocie con él tras las sanciones de la Ofac? (eltiempo.com). English version produced with AI assistance.
Image: jurvetson, BY 2.0 (via Openverse).