Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced Friday that he will ask the United States to expand the number of humanitarian visas for the thousands of Venezuelan migrants stranded on Mexican soil and urged him to reconcile with Caracas, in the face of the tragedy that the citizens of the South American country are experiencing.
In a recent agreement between the nations, Washington agreed to give humanitarian access to 24,000 Venezuelan migrants when they enter by air, while Mexico would receive an undetermined number of Caribbeans under the controversial Title 42. The number of expelled has already exceeded 4,000 cases.
“We are going to request that more be delivered,” the president said in his usual daily press conference, where he defended this regularization mechanism because, he argued, it prevents these groups from being victims of human traffickers.
Accessing the plan is not easy. For this, Venezuelans must have a sponsor in the United States and their valid passport. Only 1% of the 1,591 migrants who left that country between June and August had it, according to the Observatory of Social Research on the Border in Mexico.
Due to the difficulty in complying with the requirements, analysts and the migrants themselves have denounced that unlikely to be delivered not even the 24,000 visas agreed upon.
The Mexican leader promised on Friday to support those affected with shelter, food and medical attention, but reiterated that the only way to stop migration is to stop the phenomenon at the root by allocating investment to the nations where the diaspora originates to promote their economic development.
However, the local Catholic Church later denounced, in a letter addressed to the president, that it continues to confirm frequent violations of the human rights of migrants, arbitrary detentions carried out by immigration officials and systematic abuses by all kinds of authorities.
“We see with great concern and sadness how this government’s migration policy is being carried out,” lamented the Pastoral Office for Human Mobility, which is in charge of most hostels in the country. The government, he added, must rethink its strategy and abandon “the military and containment perspective.”
While nations try to contain the large flows of migrants, with various strategies, AMLO, an acronym by which the president is known, also urged Washington on Friday to reconcile with Caracas.
“It is necessary that relations between the government of the United States and Venezuela be restored; I am aware that they are already looking for an agreement,” he said, without giving more details.
Washington and Caracas they severed diplomatic ties in 2019during the administration of Republican Donald Trump, but with the arrival in the White House of Democrat Joe Biden, the US position softened.
Since López Obrador came to power in December 2018, Mexico has hosted several meetings between representatives of the Venezuelan government and the opposition for the parties to reach an agreement that resolves the serious political crisis that the country has been going through for years.
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