Mexican president proposes initiatives to ease poverty

By James Blears

Mexico’s president unfolds hopes and plans to US president Joe Biden, seeking funds to create three hundred and thirty thousand jobs in southern Mexico and Central America via a huge tree-planting program and workshop apprenticeships.

The letter from Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to President Biden urges an injection of money from the US to create and sustain two major employment programs, specifically encompassing Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Part of the plan involves issuing temporary work visas.

Lopez Obrador is asking Biden to contemplate and consider a fresh and new approach towards the issue of migration, which he says now needs a comprehensively different treatment. He says, “We must not limit ourselves to the concentration and application of measures… especially coercive ones.” The two neighbouring nations have already agreed to team up on work plans.

The Mexican president, nicknamed AMLO for his initials, proposes support for a government tree-planting program and a “youths building towards the future” scheme that would encompass Central America. Widespread tree planting is already underway in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas and is available to a quarter of a million farmers; there is also a workshop program for thirty thousand apprentices. This could be extended to 90,000 more young people in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.

AMLO is also appealing for Washington to assess a temporary work visa initiative to the United States, tempered, tailored, and channelled in a master plan, to accommodate workforce needs throughout the United States, boosting economic growth, while humanizing orderly migratory flows.