President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) attended the close of the Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference in San Francisco, California on November 17 in one of his rare trips outside of Mexico.
Although much of the media attention focused on President Joe Biden’s lengthy meetings with China’s Xi Jinping during the conference, his tête-à-tête with AMLO offered up several newsworthy themes, of which migration and fentanyl trafficking were at the top of the list.
The 2023 fiscal year has seen a new historic high of 2.5 million encounters of migrants occurring at the U.S.-Mexico border. Nonetheless, Biden thanked López Obrador for “sustaining effective containment operations,” according to a White House press release.
The White House said the two leaders addressed the root causes of migration and discussed ways to expand lawful pathways for migration. However, the bulletin did not mention what AMLO later said was his main proposal to Biden: the establishment of a regional development in Latin America designed to improve economic conditions and prevent people from leaving their countries. The Mexican president has long promoted the idea of slowing Central American migration through greater economic development and regional integration but has never managed to find much support in the United States for his ideas.
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