Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Wednesday appealed to the US to take urgent action to tackle the migrant crisis reverberating across the Americas.
Tens of thousands of migrants, many of them Haitians previously living in South America, have in the past few weeks arrived in Mexico in the hope of entering the US.
Instead, they have found themselves stranded in a crowded city in southern Mexico or at the border with the US, their asylum hopes quickly fading.
Photo: AFP
“Enough talking — it’s time to act,” Lopez Obrador told reporters.
Mexico and Central American countries were still waiting for several billion US dollars pledged by Washington for economic development to reduce the need for migrants to flee poverty, Lopez Obrador said.
“There was a commitment that they were going to invest US$4 billion — US$2 billion for Central America and US$2 billion for Mexico. Nothing has come — nothing,” Lopez Obrador said.
At the same time, US President Joe Biden “is interested” in solving the problem and said he was hopeful there would be a regional agreement on economic development, Lopez Obrador added.
“I think there will be results,” he said.
The Mexican leader has repeatedly proposed expanding one of his domestic welfare programs into Central America, with the aim of generating 1.2 million jobs in the region.
He has also proposed allowing participants to qualify for a US work visa after three years.
The US authorities have begun to repatriate Haitians by air from the Texas border city of Del Rio, prompting a warning from the UN that people with genuine asylum claims might be at risk.
Tens of thousands more migrants are stranded in the southern Mexican city of Tapachula, waiting for documents that would allow them to continue north.
Many had been living in Chile and Brazil, which gave them refuge after the 2010 earthquake that left about 200,000 people dead in Haiti.
They have traveled up to a dozen countries, including Panama and Colombia, where thousands are stranded near the border.
Some say that they left due to a lack of jobs or difficulties renewing their work permits during the COVID-19 pandemic, while others are driven by a desire to join relatives in the US.
In the town of Necocli on the northern coast of Colombia, about 19,000 mainly Haitian migrants are waiting for seats on boats that cross the Gulf of Uraba to Acandi, near the border with Panama.
Once across, the migrants start the dangerous trek on foot through the Darien Gap rainforest, where they battle snakes, steep ravines, swollen rivers, tropical downpours and criminals.
Under an agreement between the governments of Colombia and Panama, no more than 650 migrants are allowed to make the trip each day.
So far this year, more than 50,000 people have crossed the border between Colombia andPanama.
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