First came the May 24 slaughter of 19 Chican@ elementary school students and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, and then, on June 27 in San Antonio, the discovery of 53 Mexican and Central American migrant bodies in a tractor-trailer.

The children and teachers were massacred with an automatic weapon similar to the tens of thousands of US guns that annually arrive in Mexico and slaughter innocents there. And the death of the 53 in San Antonio ties directly to Yanqui imperialism’s militarism of the US-Mexico border. More than 650 migrants died in 2021 trying to cross La Frontera de Muerte, more than in any other year since the UN International Organization for Migration began tracking the data in 2014.

These numbers all reflect only recorded deaths. Hundreds more most likely have died alone, desperate, and anonymous, trying to escape the violence and poverty largely caused by the US economic domination and exploitation of their home countries.

AMLO, you rightly refused to attend the so-called “Summit of the Americas” last month in Los Angeles. You called out Biden for his anti-democratic decision to exclude several Latin American countries. In a few days, on July 12, you’ll be meeting one-on-one with Biden. You have an opportunity here to go beyond symbolism.

You can demand the cooperation needed to stop the flow of arms into México. You can demand an end to the racist Yanqui immigration policies that violate international law by refusing to accept and process refugee and asylum applications, a policy that forces pobres to risk death in the desert or in the tractor-trailers of greedy coyotes. The US must dismantle the Border of Death and work with México to replace it with a Border of Life.

And you can remind Biden that in the early 1900s millions of European immigrants could enter the US nearly without restriction, as are refugees from Ukraine today. Excluding non-white immigrants from Mexico and the Global South will always be anti-democratic. Aren’t we humans too, deserving of “human rights”?

Shut down La Frontera de Muerte and Open La Frontera de Vida!