BOGOTA (Reuters) – U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met Colombian President Ivan Duque on Wednesday forward of talks with regional officers to debate migration within the Americas.
Blinken, who’s visiting South America for 3 days, arrived within the Colombian capital from Ecuador and headed to the presidential palace, the place he was greeted by Duque.
Colombia is internet hosting a ministerial assembly on migration afterward Wednesday which is anticipated to incorporate international ministers from Chile, Brazil, Costa Rica, Honduras and Peru.
Earlier than leaving the Ecuadorean capital of Quito, Blinken stated international locations within the Western Hemisphere should work collectively to stem what he known as “an nearly unprecedented second for migration.”
Poverty and violence within the area’s most troubled international locations – together with the ‘Northern Triangle’ of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, as effectively Venezuela and Haiti – has pushed migration flows each north to the USA and in direction of different elements of Latin America.
Colombia has lately seen 1000’s of principally Haitian migrants congregating as they wait to journey north, and for a while has been the highest vacation spot for individuals fleeing financial and social collapse in neighboring Venezuela.
Financial downturns sparked by the coronavirus pandemic have made jobs scarce by means of a lot of the area, usually hitting immigrants hardest.
“COVID-19 has had such a devastating financial influence that it has denied alternative in locations the place alternative was already missing,” Blinken stated, after giving a speech at a personal college in Quito.
“No one in every of our international locations addressing it alone goes to succeed. We now have to have a way of shared duty and customary motion.”
Blinken’s go to to Quito targeted on highlighting that nation’s democratic credentials at a time when authoritarianism is on the rise.
Forward of his go to to Colombia, Human Rights Watch wrote to Blinken urging him to press Duque on rising violence by armed teams, police abuses towards protesters, and aerial fumigation of coca crops, which Duque’s authorities has taken steps to reinstate to deal with cocaine manufacturing.
(Reporting by Simon Lewis, Modifying by Rosalba O’Brien)
