Mexican President Andres Manuel López Obrador urged for more support from the United States and Canada in dealing with North America’s migration challenges in a press conference held on Friday to address the safe release of recent kidnapped migrants.

On December 30, 32 migrants on a bus from the Mexican city of Monterrey to Matamoros were intercepted by five armed vehicles, extorted for ransom and held hostage until their release on January 3. It was understood that once the migrants arrived in Matamoros, they would be crossing illegally to the bordering city of Brownsville, Texas. Of the 32 kidnapped, 26 were Venezuelan and 6 were Honduran, this is consistent with the high number of Venezuelan migrants that sought to cross the US-Mexican border in 2023.

President López Obrador suggested that the United States Congress approve a “plan like that of the Alliance for Progress  … which meant investing in Latin America, in the Caribbean”. The Alliance for Pregress was a $20 billion loan proposed in 1961 by the Kennedy administration to “promote democracy and undertake meaningful social reform” in Latin America. However, it has been reported the Alliance was not entirely successful, with the US Department of State stating that “only 2 percent of economic growth in 1960s Latin America directly benefited the poor; and there was a general deterioration of United States-Latin American relations by the end of the 1960s.“

López Obrador hopes that the North American relationship Mexico has with Canada and the US can ultimately be extended to all of the Americas: 

The ideal is that our Venezuelan, Honduran, Colombian, Guatemalan, and Ecuadorian brothers do not leave, that they have options, alternatives, job opportunities in their towns, which is what we have been insisting with the United States government, that we can promote jointly a development and cooperation plan in Latin American, Central American and Caribbean countries, so that people have job opportunities.

Additionally, López Obrador urged the U.S. to provide visas to allegedly “at least 10 million Hispanics who have been working honestly in the United States for more than 10 years” in an effort to support safe and permanent migration paths.