The president of Mexico, Andres Manuel López Obrador, arrived in El Salvador this Fridayon the second leg of his tour of Central America and the Caribbean, to promote a program that attacks the causes that generate irregular migration to the United States.
From GuatemalaLópez Obrador arrived around noon at the Óscar Arnulfo Romero airport, which serves San Salvador and where he was received by Foreign Minister Alexandra Hill.
From there he moved to the government house in San Salvador to hold a private meeting with President Nayib Bukele. Both leaders met for the first time in June 2019 in the city of Tapachula, Chiapas.
On that occasion, López Obrador announced the financing by Mexico of his “Sembrando Vida” program in El Salvador, in order to help reduce irregular migration, mainly among young people.
With an investment of 31 million dollars, the agroforestry program was launched in July 2019 with the goal of creating some 20,000 jobs.
“El Salvador thanks you Sembrando Vida”, could be read on banners that were placed on the highway that leads from the airport to the Salvadoran capital.
This Friday the Mexican ruler and Bukele close the working day with a statement to the press.
On Thursday, from Guatemala, López Obrador called for speed in Washington’s financial support for programs that attack poverty and violence, which lead thousands of Central Americans to irregularly migrate to the United States in search of work.
“It seems inexplicable to me that in the Capitol the approval of the 4,000 million dollars that they offered to invest in the generation of well-being in the Central American countries has been delayed so much,” he said.
López Obrador began a four-day tour on Thursday in which he will also visit Honduras, Belize and Cuba.
The Mexican Foreign Ministry ratified the president’s visit to Havana on Sunday, where this Friday an explosion, presumably due to a gas leak, destroyed a hotel under repair and caused at least eight deaths.
On the border between Mexico and the United States, thousands of undocumented Central American, Cuban and Haitian migrants are often held up, who go to North America in search of work overwhelmed by the violence and poverty that afflicts their countries. Many die on the way.
In 2021, Mexican authorities found more than 300,000 irregular migrants; while, in the last three weeks, the United States detained some 7,800 undocumented immigrants daily in the border area, almost five times the average of 2014-2019.