MEXICO CITY – Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador will have a “digital meeting” with the Vice President of the United States, Kamala Harris, on May 7, the Mexican Foreign Minister, Marcelo Ebrard and the United States government announced this Saturday.
“The meeting will discuss cooperation to deal with the pandemic and Mexico’s proposal to extend the Sembrando Vida program to Central America to deal with forced migration due to poverty,” the head of the Ministry of Relations announced on his networks. Exteriors (SRE).
The meeting with Harris, who has been in charge of the immigration issue in Washington since March, will take place before the face-to-face trip that the vice president will make in June to Mexico and Central America, according to a White House source this Wednesday.
Also, Ebrard pointed out, it is in follow-up to the first bilateral virtual meeting that López Obrador held with the president of the United States, Joe Biden, on March 1.
Also present at the meeting will be Foreign Minister Ebrard and Mexico’s Secretary of Economy, Tatiana Clouthier. “It will be a productive and cordial conversation,” the foreign minister said.
Although he did not offer more details, the Mexican Foreign Minister mentioned Sembrando Vida, a social program by López Obrador that employs more than 400,000 farmers, with an investment of $ 1.4 billion to plant 1 billion fruit and timber trees on 1 million hectares.
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The president of Mexico asked Biden this Thursday, at the White House Climate Leaders Summit, that Washington support expanding the program in southeastern Mexico and Central America “to plant an additional 3 billion trees and thus generate 1.2 million of jobs “.
But specialists have questioned the effectiveness of the program because farmers burn vegetation to access economic support, which has caused the deforestation of 73,000 hectares, according to a report by the World Resources Institute (WRI).
In addition, there are doubts about the effectiveness of the program in containing the growing migratory flow, as shown by the record figures from the Office of Customs and Border Protection (CBP, in English), which reported 172,000 undocumented detainees in March.
The woman has been trying to cross legally with her children for years, something that is often complicated by the condition of one of them who suffers from hydrocephalus.
Regarding the cooperation of the pandemic, one of Mexico’s main claims has been access to COVID-19 vaccines produced in the United States, which still prohibits exporting the drug to other countries.
Mexico received “on loan” on April 1 a total of 2.7 million AstraZeneca vaccines manufactured in the United States, which has not yet endorsed the emergency use of this drug.
While the United States has just exceeded 200 million doses applied, Mexico has only administered 15.5 million units.
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