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When parts of China entered rolling lockdowns during the country’s zero‑COVID campaign, PepsiCo factory workers in some “bubbles” stayed on site for up to 30 days at a time to keep production running. A case could halt operations and send workers into quarantine—as happened in June 2020, when confirmed COVID infections at one of PepsiCo’s Beijing factories forced nearly 500 employees into quarantine.

Anne Tse, who helped run the company’s China operations during the country’s three years of COVID-zero,  remembers how they had to change the way they did business. 

“We had to pivot,” Tse told Fortune, “by grouping our markets not by their ‘market development’ stage, but by their ‘COVID development’ stage.” In just 12 hours, her team abandoned the traditional model that grouped Chinese cities by the maturity of their consumer markets instead mapped operations around the pandemic: which provinces were entering lockdown, at peak restrictions, or reopening.

“It was a crucible,” she remembers, “but I think about how it trained the character and muscle of our associates,” she says.

That muscle is now being tested by a new set of pressures after Tse took over PepsiCo’s Asia-Pacific Foods division in early 2025.

Her mandate spans what she calls three different Asias: emerging markets such as Vietnam and Indonesia, where consumers are buying packaged snacks for the first time; mid-range markets like China and Thailand, where consumers are starting to demand differentiated products; and mature markets including Japan and Australia, where demand centers on health, convenience, and aging populations.

PepsiCo is pressing ahead in Asia as the food and beverage giant resets in the U.S, following a battle with activist investor Elliott Investment Management, which is pushing for cost cuts and higher margins. 

“By 2030, two‑thirds of the global middle class is going to be in Asia,” Tse points out. “We’re going to add another 700 million of these new middle‑class members into our part of the world.”

Three Asias, three playbooks

Tse joined PepsiCo in 2010 after stints at McKinsey and Mannings, the health and beauty chain owned by Hong Kong’s Dairy Farm Group. She became CEO for Greater China in 2021, APAC chief consumer officer in 2024, and CEO of APAC Foods in 2025.

PepsiCo’s Asia-Pacific Foods division generated $4.6 billion in revenue last year, up 2%. While it is PepsiCo’s smallest segment, compared with more than $93 billion in companywide revenue, it is the fastest-growing by volume, rising 4% even as other divisions reported declines.

Tse oversees a diverse region spanning markets at very different stages of development: Greater China, a vast consumer market with intensifying local competition; developed economies such as South Korea, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, where tastes are mature; and emerging markets across Southeast and South Asia, where incomes are rising quickly.

“It’s definitely not one market,” she says, dividing the region into three segments.

The first is the emerging cohort—including the Philippines, Vietnam and Indonesia—where consumers are crossing the $10,000 annual income threshold and entering the snack category for the first time. “From a consumer standpoint, they’re exploring the category, trying different things,” Tse says. 

PepsiCo has recently invested $90 million in a snack plant in Vietnam’s Ha Nam province, with annual capacity of more than 20,000 tons, and $200 million in a factory in Cikarang, Indonesia, marking its return to the country after exiting in 2021.

The second is a cohort of countries, including China and Thailand, where “things are getting more sophisticated,” leading to a proliferation of new snack options. For example, in China, PepsiCo mines restaurant reviews for insights into what consumers want, turning viral dishes into limited-edition flavors.

Finally, there are mature markets such as Japan, South Korea, Australia and Singapore, where snacks are already “a way of life.” But consumers are also looking for products that meet broader needs, including health and wellness. Demographic change is also shaping demand. “Aging populations need more functional nutrition,” she says.

Some markets have proved trickier to navigate than others: China is going through a consumer slump and intense price competition, which is bringing down prices even as volume grows. Australia, a more mature market, is also going through a cost-of-living crisis that’s hitting snacking. ASEAN, however, is proving to be a “very robust” market for PepsiCo’s snacks.

The local-brand threat

Last September, activist investor Elliott Investment Management revealed it held a 4% stake in PepsiCo and demanded changes at the company. Eliott pointed out that the company had become a “deep underperformer,” and argued that it needed to renew its focus on the critical North American market. 

In December, PepsiCo agreed to one of its most aggressive restructurings in years, including eliminating 20% of its U.S. brands, cutting jobs, and lowering prices on flagship products. PepsiCo shares have risen about 23% since their low last July.

Elliott’s arguments only briefly touched on PepsiCo’s international business, citing the company’s global brand strength and the possibility of “continued expansion” in overseas markets, due to rising consumer populations and a lower prevalence of GLP-1 weight loss drugs.

Still, PepsiCo—like many foreign brands—faces intensifying domestic competition. Across sectors from cars to coffee, multinational companies are finding it harder to compete with local products that offer comparable quality at lower prices and better match local tastes. In China, snack brands such as Three Squirrels have challenged global players with fast product cycles and aggressive pricing.

“News outlets say the number one challenge of operating in China is tepid consumer sentiment,” Tse says. “But everybody in the market will tell you local competition is by far the biggest challenge.”

Last November, PepsiCo released a version of Quaker Oats that combined microbes friendly to gut-health through a fermentation process. The new product combined “China’s long tradition of fermentation and PepsiCo’s capabilities in modern food science,” Tse wrote in a Linkedin post at the time. 

“Competition is good—we welcome competition because a lot of times competition makes us better,” she says to Fortune. “We need to play both games: learn from the locals to be agile, but also preserve what makes us unique and able to transcend business cycles.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The Justice Department filed a new lawsuit Friday against Harvard University, saying its leadership failed to address antisemitism on campus, creating grounds for the government to freeze existing grants and seek repayment for grants already paid.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Massachusetts, is another salvo in a protracted battle between the administration of President Donald Trump and the elite university.

“The United States cannot and will not tolerate these failures,” the Justice Department wrote in the lawsuit. It asked the court to compel Harvard to comply with federal civil rights law and to help it “recover billions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies awarded to a discriminatory institution.”

The lawsuit also asks a judge to require that Harvard call police to arrest protesters blocking parts of campus and to appoint an “independent outside monitor,” approved by the government, to ensure it complies with court orders.

Harvard did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The lawsuit comes after negotiations appear to have bogged down in the months-long battle with the Trump administration that has tested the boundaries of the government’s authority over America’s universities. What began as an investigation into campus antisemitism escalated into an all-out feud as the Trump administration slashed more than $2.6 billion in research funding, ended federal contracts and attempted to block Harvard from hosting international students.

In a pair of lawsuits filed by the university, Harvard has said it’s being unfairly penalized for refusing to adopt the administration’s views. A federal judge agreed in December, reversing the funding cuts and calling the antisemitism argument a “smokescreen.”

Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, a major association of colleges and universities, accused the administration of launching a “full scale, multi-pronged” attack on Harvard. Friday’s lawsuit, he said, is just the latest attempt to pressure Harvard to agree to changes favored by the administration.

“When bullies pound on the table and don’t get they want, they pound again,” Mitchell said.

The Trump administration began investigating allegations of discrimination against Harvard’s Jewish and Israeli students less than two weeks after the president took office. The allegations focus on Harvard’s actions during and after pro-Palestinian demonstrations during the Israel-Hamas war.

Officials concluded Harvard did not adequately address concerns raised about antisemitism that drove some students to conceal their religious skullcaps and avoid classes. During protests of the war, Trump officials said, Harvard permitted students to demonstrate against Israel’s actions in the school library and allowed a pro-Palestinian encampment to remain on campus for 20 days, “in violation of university policy.”

In its lawsuit Friday, the Justice Department also accused Harvard of failing to discipline staff or students who protested or tacitly endorsed the demonstrations, such as by canceling or dismissing classes that conflicted with protests.

“Harvard University has failed to protect its Jewish students from harassment and has allowed discrimination to wreak havoc on its campus,” White House press secretary Liz Huston said Friday on X. “President Trump is committed to ensuring every student can pursue their academic goals in a safe environment.”

Despite their bitter dispute, Harvard and the Trump administration have held some negotiations, and the two sides have reportedly been close to reaching an agreement on multiple occasions. Last year, the administration and the university were reportedly approaching a deal that would have required Harvard to pay $500 million to regain access to federal funding and to end the investigations. Almost a year later, Trump upped that figure to $1 billion, saying that Harvard has been “behaving very badly.”

At the same time, the administration was taking steps in a civil rights investigation that had the potential to jeopardize all of Harvard’s federal funding.

In June, the Trump administration made a formal finding that Harvard tolerated antisemitism.

In a letter sent to Harvard, a federal task force said its investigation had found the university was a “willful participant” in antisemitic harassment of Jewish students and faculty. The task force threatened to refer the case to the Justice Department to file a civil rights lawsuit “as soon as possible,” unless Harvard came into compliance.

When colleges are found in violation of federal civil rights law, they almost always reach compliance through voluntary agreements. When the government determines a resolution can’t be negotiated, it can try to sever federal funding through an administrative process or, as the Trump administration has done, by referring the case to the Justice Department through litigation.

Such an impasse has been extraordinarily rare in recent decades.

Last summer, Harvard responded that it strongly disagreed with the government’s investigative finding and was committed to fighting bias.

“Antisemitism is a serious problem and no matter the context, it is unacceptable,” the university said in a statement. “Harvard has taken substantive, proactive steps to address the root causes of antisemitism in its community.”

In a letter last spring, Harvard President Alan M. Garber told government officials that the school had formed a task force to combat antisemitism, which released a detailed report of what unfolded on campus after Hamas militants stormed Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing around 1,200 people and abducting 251 others. Israel retaliated with an offensive that killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and displaced around 90% of Gaza’s population — prompting pro-Palestinian demonstrations at colleges around the country.

After the demonstrations at Harvard, Garber said the university had hired a new provost and new deans and that it had reformed its discipline policies to make them “more consistent, fair and effective.”

Since he took office, Trump has targeted elite universities he believes are overrun by left-wing ideology and antisemitism. His administration has frozen billions of dollars in research grants, which colleges have come to rely on for scientific and medical research.

Several universities have reached agreements with the White House to restore funding. Some deals have included direct payments to the government, including $200 million from Columbia University. Brown University agreed to pay $50 million toward state workforce development groups.

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AP Education Writer Collin Binkley contributed to this report.

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The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The U.S. Education Department is handing off a portion of its student loan portfolio to the Treasury Department, a first step toward shedding management of all student loans as Trump administration officials dismantle the federal education agency.

Under an agreement announced Thursday, the Treasury Department will take over management of student loans whose borrowers are in default, meaning they are months behind on payments. Those loans add up to about $180 billion, or 11% of the government’s $1.7 trillion student loan portfolio.

Eventually, the Treasury Department is to take responsibility for all student loans, according to the agreement. A second phase with no timeframe says Treasury will “assume operational responsibility” over non-defaulted loans, “to the extent practicable.”

Breaking off the student loan operation would mark the biggest step yet in closing the department, which President Donald Trump ordered to be dismantled almost exactly a year ago. Many Americans know the department mostly for its role doling out grants and loans for college, and those streams of funding are by far the agency’s largest.

Borrowers do not need to do anything as the change goes through, the administration says. They will continue to work with the same loan servicer and repay their loans the same way.

The 17-page agreement outlines a stunning realignment of the nation’s federal student loan programs, which have been overseen by the Education Department since it was created more than 40 years ago.

The agreement “marks an intentional and historic step toward breaking up the Federal education bureaucracy and dramatically improving the administration of Federal student aid programs,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement.

In justifying the change, Trump officials said the Education Department is “ill-equipped” to handle such a big loan portfolio. They blamed the Biden administration for focusing on efforts to cancel student loans rather then help borrowers get back on track with payments. Officials cited recent data showing that fewer than half of all borrowers are currently making payments on their loans, with almost a quarter in default.

Opponents raise concerns about borrower confusion

The agreement is likely to invite legal challenges. Some opponents note that federal law requires student loans to be overseen by the Education Department. Trump officials believe they’ve found a workaround by framing it as a partnership, with some components, including the policies underpinning student loans, remaining at the Education Department.

Student loan advocates condemned the move, saying it only adds to confusion as the Trump administration overhauls student loan programs.

“The Department of Education has issued a dizzying series of rule changes that make it harder for borrowers to figure out what their options are on their federal student loans,” said Kyra Taylor, an attorney at the National Consumer Law Center. She warned that any errors in loan collection would have “devastating effects on families.”

The move is part of Trump’s campaign to shutter the Education Department, an agency he says was overrun by liberal thinking. Only Congress has authority to close the department, but Trump officials are picking it apart through a series of inter-government agreements that relocate the department’s operations to other federal offices.

The future of the government’s enormous student loan portfolio has been one of the biggest unanswered questions. At her Senate confirmation hearing, Education Secretary Linda McMahon called Treasury a “natural” place for student loans. Trump later said they would be overseen by the Small Business Administration.

Conservatives have tried previously to move student loans

During Trump’s first term, his education chief talked about setting up a semi-private bank to manage student debt. The conservative Heritage Foundation promoted something similar in its Project 2025 plan, calling for a new “government corporation with professional governance and management.”

The Treasury Department often has been discussed as an option, yet student loans are seen as a particularly complex form of debt and some question whether the agency has the right technical expertise. In a 2015 pilot, Treasury tried to collect payments from a sample of thousands of borrowers in default. Its success rate was lower than that of the private collection agencies contracted by the Education Department.

Federal student loan borrowers are typically considered in default if they haven’t made a payment in more than 270 days. About 9.2 million Americans are in default on student loans, according to Education Department data released this month. Going into default can bring a heavy hit to credit scores, and the government can withhold pay and Social Security benefits.

The latest deal from the administration indicates a willingness to open up the hood of student loan operations at a perilous moment. About 12 million Americans are behind on federal student loan payments in some way, and the industry is bracing for a potentially historic surge in loan defaults as pandemic-era protections come to an end.

Earlier this year, Trump officials postponed their plans to restart involuntary collections on defaulted loans, which could have meant withheld earnings for millions of Americans. It’s seen as a politically volatile issue during a tough midterm year where affordability is already on voters’ minds.

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The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

CBS News said Friday it will shut down its storied radio news service after nearly 100 years of operation, ending an era and blaming challenging economic times as the world moves on to digital sources and podcasts.

When it went on the air in September 1927, the service was the precursor to the entire network, giving a youthful William S. Paley a start in the business. Famed broadcaster Edward R. Murrow’s rooftop reports during the Nazi bombing of London during World War II kept Americans listening anxiously.

Today, CBS News Radio provides material to an estimated 700 stations across the country and is known best for its top-of-the-hour news roundups. The service will end on May 22, the network said Friday.

“Radio is woven into the fabric of CBS News and that’s always going to be part of our history,” CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss said in delivering the news to the staff. “I want you to know that we did everything we could, including before I joined the company, to try and find a viable solution to sustain the radio operation.”

But with the radical changes in the media industry, “we just could not find a way to make that possible,” she said.

Not the first radio cuts at CBS

CBS News cut some of its radio programming late last year, including its “Weekend Roundup” and “World News Roundup Late Edition,” in an attempt to keep the service going.

It was unclear how many people will lose their jobs because of the radio shutdown. CBS News was cutting about 6% of its workforce, or more than 60 people, on Friday. It’s not the end of turmoil at the network, as parent company Paramount Global is likely to absorb CNN as part of its announced purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery.

Along with newspapers, radio was the dominant medium in how Americans got their news from shortly after the dawn of commercial radio in 1920 through the 1940s, with people in their living rooms listening to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “Fireside Chats” during the Depression. CBS News Radio’s broadcast about Germany’s invasion of Austria in 1938, the first time Murrow was heard on the air, was an historic marker for the service.

Broadcasters like Douglas Edwards, Dallas Townsend and Christopher Glenn were familiar voices on CBS News Radio. The beginning of the television era in the 1950s began a long slide for radio, often an afterthought today with the world online and on phones. Those seeking audio often turn to podcasts before radio.

“This is another part of the landscape that has fallen off into the sea,” said Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers, a trade publication for radio talk shows. “It’s a shame. It’s a loss for the country and for the industry.”

A major radio player for many decades

CBS News Radio was a major force for generations of Americans. “Its heyday spanned decades,” Harrison said. “It was quality on every level. It sounded good. Its coverage was as objective as possible within the realm of human nature. Its resources were extensive. It had a very high trust factor that was considered the standard of the day.”

The front page of CBS News’ website did not immediately carry news of the demise.

Weiss, founder of the Free Press website and without broadcast news experience before being hired by CBS parent Paramount’s new management, has quickly become a headline-maker and polarizing figure in journalism. She held a “60 Minutes” story critical of President Donald Trump’s deportation policy from being broadcast for a month and has critics watching to see if she’s moving the network in a Trump-friendly direction.

Addressing her staff in January, three months into her job as CBS News boss, she invoked the network’s legendary newsman Walter Cronkite as a symbol of old thinking and said that if the network continues with its current strategy, “we’re toast.” She announced the hiring of 18 new contributors and said CBS News needs to do stories that will “surprise and provoke — including inside our own newsroom.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Former Shark Tank star Mark Cuban has finally found an assistant to help him maintain a clear inbox, and its name is Mac (Mini). 

The billionaire entrepreneur has always preferred email to phone calls, partly because he likes to send more comprehensive responses via email and because it’s searchable even decades later. Plus, when it comes to phone calls, “I’m going to forget half the stuff that we talked about,” he previously has said.

Cuban is also notoriously tidy, aiming to keep his inbox to under 20 unread emails—or 10 on a good day—even if he has to read up to 1,000 emails per day on three phones.

For years, he’s handled this obsessive attentiveness to his communications on his own, saying an assistant would merely “slow things down.” Still, the increase in AI-generated cold emails and unwanted subscriptions have now obligated him to turn to AI for help, he said in an interview on the TBPN podcast published Thursday.

“I do what everybody else does. I bought a Mac Mini,” Cuban said on the podcast, referring to Apple’s compact desktop computer.

The Mac Mini is increasingly selling out in China as people turn to the affordable computer to run AI agents, especially autonomous AI tool OpenClaw. Unlike browser-based AI tools such as ChatGPT, locally run agents like OpenClaw, which OpenAI acquired last month, process commands directly on a user’s own hardware, without routing data through the cloud, which makes the process faster and more private.

While OpenClaw can run on a PC as well, some users prefer the Mac Mini because it is relatively affordable—a new device starts at $599, and a used one goes for even less. The device also has good specs, is small and portable, while alos power-efficient and silent, which is helpful as OpenClaw has to run continuously in the background.

The Dallas Mavericks minority owner admitted he’s still learning, but said he’s taught the AI on his Mac Mini to hit Gmail’s built-in unsubscribe feature to do away with pesky mailing lists he doesn’t want.

“Then, I just review it,” he said. “It’s still a work in progress, but at least I have a path.”

For his part, the billionaire has been experimenting with AI in his email for years. He previously said he used Gmail’s AI recommendations for 10% to 20% of his responses and used AI as a “typing hack” in longer replies, even if at times he jumps in to impart his own style.

Learning to use AI agents is essential for entrepreneurs, Cuban added in the podcast interview.

“Once you figure out how to do agents, then you can do them a little better than most other people, and then you can turn that into what would have been a [software-as-a-service] business in the past,” he said.

Cuban isn’t the only one that has used AI to simplify their work life. Apple CEO Tim Cook, who receives between 700 and 800 emails daily from customers, said Apple Intelligence’s email summary feature in the iPhone’s Mail app has transformed how he reads emails.

While he used to read long emails, now he relies on the summary feature: “It’s changed my life,” Cook told the Wall Street Journal in 2024. 

“If I can save time here and there, it adds up to something significant across a day, a week, a month,” he said.

Meanwhile, Cuban said while AI-generated cold emails are surging now, eventually he believes things will go back to normal.

“We’re in that trial and error phase where people are like ‘We’re going to try it, see what happens. You know, maybe we’ll get lucky,’” he said. “And then they’ll get bored and then it’ll drop off.” 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

A parent wants to see their kid make it in life. Maybe that’s going to a good school. Maybe it’s curing some disease or making it to the big leagues. And a parent wants to help with that journey—after all, it’s a parent’s obligation to care for their child. But how that care looks like has changed over time. It once simply meant school pickups and weekend soccer games, then college savings and late-night financial advice calls. But for many parents today, that support stretches far beyond childhood, following them well into adulthood.

A new study from financial services firm Northwestern Mutual reveals that parents are stepping in on one essential step for achieving the American dream: the down payment. The survey—conducted through more than 4,300 online interviews in January—found that more than half of parents, or 52%, are open to considering helping their kid buy a home—and 22% have already stepped in. 

Some parents are even rethinking the critical steps to ensuring their children have a shot at generating wealth. Twenty-nine percent of parents think helping their kid buy a home is more important than helping them pay for college, and more than half (55%) say it’s a toss-up for either one.

“A lot of these degrees are maybe not as valuable as they once were,” Ed Amos, wealth management advisor at Northwestern Mutual, told Fortune. “Having flexibility in those dollars is what parents are looking for.”

The value proposition of a four-year college degree is falling. Recent college grads are facing recessionary circumstances: 5.6% unemployment, surpassing the rate for all workers. And underemployment, or the share of graduates working in jobs that typically do not require a college degree sits at 42.5%. 

And the vibes are dire. AI is threatening a white-collar recession, which is expected to hit recent grads hardest. At the same time, home prices are skyrocketing. Homeownership—the ultimate promise of the modern American dream—is growing out of reach for young people. The average age of the first-time homebuyer hit 40 last year, up from the early 30s just a decade ago as the median home price tops $410,000 today.

Betting on bricks, not degrees

As some parents hesitate to shell out the almost $500,000 price tag attached to what a college degree could cost today, others are rethinking how they can position their children for financial success later in life. Amos said some parents he’s worked with are betting on homeownership as a key tool to ensuring their investments are well placed. One family he worked with, for example, helped their child buy a duplex while still in college, allowing their kid to live in one unit and rent out the other to pay down the mortgage, and ultimately build up equity before even entering the full-time workforce.

“The benefits of starting that wealth building early in life has tremendous impacts on where their children will be over the next few decades,” Amos said.

Yet Gen Z is finding itself in an increasingly precarious position. Young people today are left with crumbs of wealth compared to their Boomer and Gen X parents. Boomers today hold more than $86 trillion in assets, according to Federal Reserve data, more wealth than any other living generation. Gen X holds a significant slice of the economic pie too, with close to $44 trillion. That’s more than three-quarters the $167 trillion in total U.S. wealth. 

“It’s becoming less and less accessible to the entry-level employee straight out of college, trying to buy their first home,” Amos said. “It’s just becoming more and more difficult for these newer generations to do it on their own.”

High stakes gambling

With most of the country’s wealth locked away from Gen Z, many in the generation are looking for new and creative entry points into wealth generation. The Northwestern Mutual study found that Gen Zers are turning to high-risk, speculative assets for a shot at generating wealth. Nearly one-third of Gen Z have either invested in, or considered investing in crypto. One-third has also dabbled with the idea of, or are actively engaged in sports betting and prediction markets. And about 14% have placed their bets on meme stocks, or those viral stocks like GameStop popularized by communities like Reddit’s r/wallstreetbets subreddit—which now boasts over 4 million members—infamous after investors drove up the GameStop stock in 2021.

While these speculative bets paint a picture of a generation’s frantic scramble for financial footing, Amos said the most sustainable path to the American dream requires Boomers to hand over their wealth via more traditional assets like real estate. 

“Helping usher in that transfer sooner than passing will allow everyone to be able to share in that American dream,” he said.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Colombian President Gustavo Petro has been designated a “priority target” by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration as federal prosecutors in New York probe his alleged ties to drug traffickers, according to people familiar with the matter and records seen by The Associated Press.

DEA records show Petro has surfaced in multiple investigations dating to 2022, many based on interviews with confidential informants. The alleged crimes the DEA has investigated include his possible dealings with Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, a scheme to leverage his “total peace” plan to benefit prominent traffickers who contributed to his presidential campaign. The records also suggest the use of law enforcement to smuggle cocaine and fentanyl through Colombian ports.

The “priority target” label is reserved for suspects DEA deems to have a “significant impact” on the drug trade.

An inquiry in early stages

In recent months, prosecutors in Brooklyn and Manhattan have been questioning drug traffickers about their ties to Petro and specifically about allegations the Colombian president’s representatives solicited bribes to block their extradition to the United States, according to a person with knowledge of the inquiry who wasn’t authorized to discuss the ongoing inquiry and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

The person said it wasn’t clear whether federal prosecutors have implicated Petro in any crime.

The investigation is focusing at least in part on allegations that representatives of Petro solicited bribes from drug traffickers at the Colombian jail La Picota in exchange for a promise that they not be extradited to the U.S., one of the people said.

A spokesperson for the Colombian presidency declined to comment on the ongoing investigations into Petro or the subsequent legal proceedings.

Petro has consistently denied allegations of drug trafficking, particularly after Trump labeled him an “illegal drug leader” and the Treasury Department sanctioned him in late 2025 for alleged ties to the trade without offering evidence. Petro maintains that, while his administration aggressively targets major cartels, it remains focused on a more lenient, social-based approach for peasant farmers who cultivate coca leaf.

The federal inquiry was reported earlier Friday by The New York Times.

Petro came under scrutiny through the course of drug trafficking investigations by New York authorities that led them to identify him as a subject, according to another person familiar with the matter.

The inquiries into Petro are in the early stages, and it is not clear whether they will result in charges, this person said, adding the White House has had no role in the investigations.

Family members under scrutiny

Petro, a former rebel leader, soared into office promising to reduce the country’s dependence on fossil fuels and reallocate state resources to addressing entrenched poverty.

A leftist politician known for winding sometimes incoherent speeches, he has regularly criticized the Trump administration over its support for Israel, bombing of drug boats in the Caribbean and likened the White House migration crackdown to “Nazi” tactics.

After one such outburst, at a pro-Palestinian demonstration outside the United Nations headquarters in New York, Trump retaliated by revoking Petro’s U.S. visa. He also briefly slapped high tariffs on Colombia over Petro’s refusal to accept deportation flights from the United States.

But more recently the two have shown signs of getting along. After a meeting at the White House in February, Trump described Petro as “terrific.”

Colombian authorities have for years been investigating members of Petro’s family for possible criminal acts.

His son, Nicolás Petro, was charged in 2023 with soliciting illegal campaign contributions from a convicted drug trafficker to fund a lavish lifestyle of expensive cars and homes. The younger Petro has pleaded not guilty and his father has said none of the money was used to fund his campaign.

The president’s brother, Juan Fernando Petro, has also been implicated in secret negotiations that allegedly took place with imprisoned drug traffickers to shield them from extradition to the U.S. in exchange for their disarmament.

Politics and cocaine

Politics in Colombia have long been tainted by cocaine, of which it is the world’s largest supplier. In the 1980s, drug lord Pablo Escobar was elected to the country’s Congress with the support of one of Colombia’s most traditional parties. A decade later, his rivals from the Cali cartel flooded the presidential campaign of Ernesto Samper with illegal donations.

The now defunct urban guerrilla group Petro belonged to, the 19th of April Movement, has long been suspected of taking money from Escobar’s Medellin cartels as part of its deadly siege of the Supreme Court in 1985. Petro did not participate in the attack, which left several guerrillas and around half the high court’s magistrates dead. Leaders of the group have always denied any links to the cartel.

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Durkin Richer reported from Washington. Goodman reported from Miami. Mike Sisak contributed from New York and Astrid Suárez from Bogotá, Colombia.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com