Politics

Lopez Obrador, Bukele discuss migration, Summit of the Americas

San Salvador, May 6 (EFE).- The presidents of Mexico and El Salvador spoke on Friday about migration and the Ninth Summit of the Americas, scheduled to be held in the United States in June.

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and Nayib Bukele held a private meeting at the Presidential House in San Salvador.

“We were discussing several issues (…) We also talked about the Summit of the Americas. We talked about migration, which is an issue that I think concerns many countries, and we looked at how we can solve this problem,” the Salvadoran president said at a press conference after the meeting.

Lopez Obrador arrived in El Salvador on Friday from Guatemala.

He was scheduled to depart for Honduras later in the day, the third stop of his official tour.

Bukele, who described the meeting with Lopez Obrador as excellent and very productive, said that “migration is an issue that we have to resolve” and that “it is best for people to stay in our countries.”

“We don’t want our productive and working people to leave our countries looking for prosperity abroad. We want them to stay here and for that each country is making efforts, but we are aware that we must do much more,” Bukele said.

Lopez Obrador said that the United States is “the protagonist of the migratory phenomenon” and “must, therefore, be co-responsible for resolving it, modifying its immigration policies.”

“We postulate that everyone has the right to remain in the country they were born in, that no one should be forced to emigrate due to hunger or violence and that no one is riddled with bullets while crossing the border,” the president said.

He added that the US must also “help address the conditions that force millions of people to leave their places of residence.”

Deportations from the US of Salvadorans, Guatemalans and Hondurans rose by 583.8 percent at the end of the first quarter of 2022, according to data from the International Organization for Migration, accessed by EFE.

The report points out that between January and March this year, 24,157 people returned to the Northern Triangle of Central America from the US, compared to 3,533 in the same period of 2021.

The total number of returnees included 12,041 men, 6,652 women, 2,808 boys and 2,656 girls. EFE

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