López Obrador announces a trip to Central America to seek agreements and stop migratory flows

Central American migrants protest this Friday in front of a military station in the municipality of Tapachula.Juan Manuel Blanco (EFE)

Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced this Friday that in May he will make an official trip to the northern triangle of Central America to seek agreements with the authorities of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Belize and stop migratory flows.

The president of Mexico, who will also include a visit to Cuba on this tour, has defended his strategy from Tapachula, in Chiapas, where he has been received by a protest of migrants trapped on the southern border.

The solution to the phenomenon passes, in his opinion, by reducing inequality in the countries of origin and by greater involvement of the governments of the United States and Canada.

As the president addressed the media during his morning press conference, desperation led dozens of people to sew their lips shut in protest.

The lack of administrative exit and the abandonment have left a crowd in limbo at several border crossings in the north and south.

This situation is not new, but day after day exasperation spreads.

The Government's response always spells out two words: "Sowing Life."

It is the name of a social program that, according to what the head of state has indicated today, already gives "permanent employment to more than 80,000 Chiapas" in planting and repopulating the countryside.

The idea is to make it viable, he has maintained, also in Central America.

The most pressing challenge related to migration, however, is the activity of criminal organizations and trafficking mafias.

“Every day we are dealing with this matter.

There is human trafficking, there are those who charge to transport migrants, there are carriers who are dedicated to this, to human trafficking. We have to be careful that migrants are not transported in boxes of trailers, that misfortunes like those of Tuxtla do not happen.

We have had cases of our brothers from Guatemala in Tamaulipas, who were assassinated”, López Obrador recalled.

In the northern state, 16 Guatemalans who were pursuing their American dream were massacred, shot to death and burned.

And last December a truck carrying migrants overturned near Tuxtla Gutiérrez, leaving dozens dead.

However, López Obrador has assured that on the southern border "there are job possibilities."

“There are employment opportunities in Sembrando Vida, we are financing these programs in El Salvador, in Honduras, in Belize.

We are about to reach an agreement with the Government of Guatemala, and we are doing it here in Chiapas”, he stated before attributing the shortcomings of the plan to deal with migratory flows to the vision of the Joe Biden Administration.

The president and the ambassador of the United States in Mexico, Ken Salazar, had been summoned to discuss the issue this Friday from the border, but a meeting has not yet been reported.

“Whoever leaves their community brings a plan, which is to get to the United States,” López Obrador said.

“And if they leave, it is already very difficult for us [to stop them], even if job opportunities are offered.”

Mexico has been asking the White House and Canada for greater flexibility in granting work visas.

The purpose is that the ordering of migratory flows also helps to reactivate the regional economy in North America after the harsh blows of the covid-19 pandemic.

"It cannot be that only migrants are being detained," the Mexican president continued.

“They need that labor force, but in all of this the partisan struggle and the electoral processes intervene a lot.

This year there are elections [to the Senate] in the US and many elections must be taken from those circumstances.”

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