Biden and Lasso meet today with focus on violence, trade and migration

The American President, Joe Bidenand its counterpart Ecuadorian, William Lassowill meet this Monday at the White House with the focus on cooperation to deal with violence from drug trafficking, trade relations and migration.

SIGHT: Ecuador considers it “fair” to share with the US the costs of fighting drug trafficking

The meeting will take place at 1:30 p.m. local time (6:30 p.m. GMT) and will be the second face-to-face between the two leaders, who already met on the sidelines of the Summit of the Americas held in June in Los Angeles.

In statements to the press on Sunday, Lasso made it clear that one of his priorities will be to improve security cooperation with the United States to combat drug cartels that have led to an increase in violence.

Specifically, the Lasso government has said that it needs 5,000 million dollars over the next three years to deal with the violence and is still looking for how to obtain those funds, so there could be requests to the United States in that regard.

Ecuador is located between the two largest cocaine producers in the world, Colombia and Peru, and criminal groups use Ecuador as a transit route for the drug that reaches the United States and Europe, according to the latest World Drug Report published by the United Nations. .

Another of the issues that will dominate the bilateral meeting will be trade, Lasso declared on Sunday upon leaving Ecuador.

Specifically, he wants to talk to Biden about signing a free trade agreement, and if that doesn’t materialize, he wants to at least get some star products like bananas, shrimp, tuna, and flowers off the high tariffs for enter the US market.

Ecuador is the only country in the Latin American Pacific that does not have a free trade agreement with the United States.

China, however, is about to close a free trade agreement with Ecuador and this year it has already ousted the US as the Latin American country’s main trading partner.

On the other hand, the United States is interested in talking about migration, John Kirby, one of the White House spokesmen, announced on Friday.

Right now, what worries the US the most is the expiration of the so-called “Title 42″, a rule inherited from Donald Trump (2017-2021) that has allowed the Biden government to expel the majority of migrants and applicants for asylum arriving at the border.

The Biden Executive fears that the expiration of that measure will lead to an increase in migrant arrivals.

Ecuador is not one of the largest senders of migrants to the United States, but detentions of Ecuadorians at the border have been on the rise.

According to data from the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), arrests of Ecuadorian migrants have gone from 750 in October 2021 to more than 7,000 in October of this year, a very significant increase.

Source: Elcomercio

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I am Jack Morton and I work in 24 News Recorder. I mostly cover world news and I have also authored 24 news recorder. I find this work highly interesting and it allows me to keep up with current events happening around the world.