The Vice President of the United States, Kamala Harris, has not been even 48 hours on Latin American soil, but it has been enough time to seal agreements with the Governments of Mexico and Guatemala focused on attacking the causes of migration and to stoke two controversies in her country originally. On the one hand, Republicans have accused her of going abroad before going to the southern border, the most obvious scene of the migration crisis. On the other hand, the more progressive side of his party has attacked him for the statements in which he asked Guatemalans not to migrate to the US On the afternoon of this Tuesday, before heading back to Washington, he wanted to make his own assessment of the visit: “This trip has been successful in terms of the path we have marked and the progress we have made.The agreements we have reached are the result of all the previous work we have done before this week and they are very tangible and very specific ”, he said at a press conference in a hotel in the capital.
"I have no doubt that the work we have done, including the agreements we have announced today, will have a positive impact, although it will not be overnight," added the vice president before warning that " the causes of the origin of migration are not going to be solved in a two-day trip ”.
“It is a problem that in many cases is generational.
This is a job that must be done with a commitment to go to the bottom and knowing that nothing we do is going to be solved overnight ", said the vice president, who has promised to do what is necessary in the time available to attack "the complexity of the problem."
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Regarding criticism from Republicans for not having visited the southern border yet, Harris has said that he made the decision to go earlier to the countries where the migrants come from because President Joe Biden gave him the task of attacking the origin of the problem.
"I'm going to visit the border and I've done it before," Harris said, recalling that he did it on multiple occasions when he was a prosecutor in California.
But, he clarified: "It is short-sighted for those of us who want to solve problems to suggest that I am going to react to the consequence instead of attacking the cause."
Harris has offered these statements at the end of the second day of his trip in which he met with the president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and with women entrepreneurs and union leaders. In the morning, the vice president witnessed, together with the Mexican president, the signing of a memorandum of understanding by which both countries agree to improve conditions in Central America to contain the flow of migrants from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador from the source, which in recent months has reached record numbers. In addition, among other agreements, the two governments set for September the reactivation of the High Level Economic Dialogue (DEAN), a platform that will give visibility to the cooperation mechanisms included in the T-MEC, a tool that promotes investments in North America.
According to Harris, the DEAN will include prominent members of the US and Mexican cabinets who will work together to expand the economic relationship between the two countries. "We have seen throughout our history that there is a direct relationship: when one does well, the other also does well", said the vice president before mentioning that the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) foresees a growth of the Gross domestic product of 6.9% for the United States in 2021, the highest in 40 years. "We understand that this prosperity will be shared and can be shared with our neighbors, especially the closest ones," he said.
The vice president has assured that in the meeting with López Obrador it was proposed to “re-examine the travel restrictions,” although she did not mention a date for the eventual reopening of the common border, closed to non-essential activities since March 2020. The Mexican government hopes that normalization in this regard may begin next July, after increasing the percentage of vaccinated in the north of the country. However, the vice president has said that they have not discussed the possibility of ending Title 42, another measure implemented by Washington due to the pandemic for which the United States is not accepting new asylum applications at the southern border, something that in the The practice has meant the hot return of hundreds of thousands of migrants and asylum seekers to Mexican territory.
On Tuesday, in Guatemala, Harris pledged with the president, Alejandro Giammattei, to manage with US businessmen local investments, an empowerment program for young women, a special force that helps with investigations against corruption and support for the fight against drug trafficking. and the human trafficking gangs that work on the southern and northern borders of the Central American country.
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