Mexico brings major leverage to negotiations, as Biden needs Mexican help to fix a problem that is driving down his poll numbers, said three U.S. officials.

… in late December, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Secretary of State Antony Blinken went to Mexico to meet with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to ask for greater assistance. Those conversations were “preliminary,” the officials said, and did not result in hard promises from either side.

In a press conference on Friday, López Obrador called on the U.S. to approve a plan that would deploy $20 billion to Latin American and Caribbean countries, suspend the U.S. blockade of Cuba, remove all sanctions against Venezuela and grant at least 10 million Hispanics living in the U.S. the right to remain and work legally.

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20240110130556/https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/biden-asks-mexico-help-stop-record-surge-migrants-rcna132711

  • TragicNotCute@lemmy.worldEnglish
    23·
    10 months ago

    Yes. They are involved in a ton of industries, legal and illegal. For example, if you have eaten an avacado recently, there’s an excellent chance it’s a conflict avacado with money being paid to the cartel by farmers for “protection”.

    “It’s not only avocados. Mexican organised crime has long mutated away from ‘just’ drugs trafficking,” he said. “Today, the model is this: you control a given territory, and within in it you exploit whichever commodity is locally available. That includes avocados, but also limes, papayas, strawberries, illegal logging and mining, to name but a few.”

    https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/dec/30/are-mexican-avocados-the-worlds-new-conflict-commodity