Honduran President: The US is the Largest Consumer of Drugs, Shares Blame in Immigration Crisis
When four countries' leaders met Friday to discuss the U.S.'s immigration crisis, there were several opinions about sharing in the troubles.
On one hand, U.S. President Barack Obama said that it is a shared problem and needs to be solved cooperatively, according to MSNBC.
But Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez told Politico that Mexico, the U.S. and the three Central American countries who are seeing mass migration to the U.S. -- Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador -- are all equally to blame for the problem.
The U.S. shares the burden because while trafficking has been fought as a public health issue by the government, and cooperative efforts to arrest traffickers and drug lords have been successful -- the U.S. is the biggest consumer of those drugs and he believes that aspect has been ignored by the government.
"We all share responsibility, from those who produce the drug to the transit countries, but also the country that uses the drugs. And the United States is the great consumer of the drugs. The advantage that you have here -- if you can call it an advantage -- is that the violence has been separated from the transit of drugs. That's why for many officials and public servants the drug problem in the United States is one of public health. In Central America, the drug problem is life or death," he said.
He said that drug trafficking and lack of opportunity in the Honduras have driven the recent influx of unaccompanied immigrant children, and that some of them simply seek to be reunited with their families.
"I want to tell the American people that children who come from Central America are not criminals, they are human beings," Hernandez said, according to La Tribuna.
He went on to explain that the war on drugs has helped Mexico and Colombia, but negatively affected Central America.
"A number of drug lords that have now settled in Central America and that have now linked up with ... gangs in an unholy alliance as it were that has generated levels of violence that are unprecedented," Hernandez said, according to ABC. "So what has helped Mexico, what has helped Colombia, alas has created a problem of gigantic proportions for us."
He told Politico that a map of the area where the children are coming from, and the map of the area where the drugs are coming in align perfectly.
"I would expect that that the electoral politics that are playing right now (in the U.S.) will not affect a decision that has to do with tending to a humanitarian crisis," he said.
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