MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said Wednesday he plans to visit his country’s southern border to discuss with governors and mayors there how to stop the smuggling of child migrants — an issue of growing concern for the United States.

The United States government has asked Mexico and the countries of Central America’s Northern Triangle — Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador — to help lower the number of child migrants arriving at its own border with Mexico.

The Biden administration said this week it had reached agreements with those countries to use troops to crack down on migrant smuggling. The move was criticized by human rights defenders and migrant advocates, who said it would make it more difficult for people seeking international protection.

But López Obrador said at his daily news conference on Wednesday that the desire to protect those rights is motivating Mexico’s efforts to stop child migrants.

“To protect children we are going to reinforce the surveillance, the protection, the care on our southern border because it’s to defend human rights,” he said.

He showed photographs of a tractor-trailer rig stopped in the southern city of Tuxtla Gutierrez on Tuesday that was carrying 149 migrants, including 28 minors, from Honduras and Guatemala.

The president also said that the director of Mexico’s child and families protection agency would move from Mexico City to the southern city of Tapachula until the situation improves.

The number of children arriving at the U.S. southern border has become a growing problem for the Biden administration. It continues quickly returning most migrants to Mexico, but has said it will not do so with unaccompanied minors.

The government has struggled to house and care for the children in acceptable settings before reuniting them with relatives.

Central American families, encouraged by smugglers, are increasingly bringing young children with them, hoping that it will improve their chances of being allowed to stay in the U.S. while their cases proceed. Some of the parents returned to Mexico have decided to send their children back across the border to the U.S. unaccompanied.

In late March, Biden said that Vice President Kamala Harris would take charge of U.S. efforts in Mexico and the Northern Triangle to address the root causes of migration. She said Wednesday she soon planned to visit Mexico and Guatemala.

Harris said she is working from the position that most people don’t want to leave their homes. Problems of economic resiliency, climate, water, food sustainability and corruption won’t be fixed overnight, but the U.S. is studying what it can do about economic development in those countries, she said.

The Northern Triangle has been the main source of migrants arriving at the U.S. southern border in recent years. Deeply rooted corruption, stagnant economies and high crime have been among the main forces driving people out. Then last year the COVID-19 pandemic hit, deepening economic desperation, and in November two major hurricanes raked the region increasing the misery.

HAVANA (AP) — This week’s Communist Party congress could be the last with a Castro at the helm of Cuba’s all-powerful political institution.

Six years after the death of Fidel Castro, his brother and fellow leader of the island’s 1959 revolution, Raul Castro, is being watched to see if he fulfills his commitment to give up the reins of the only political organization permitted in the country of 11 million people.

Raul Castro in 2016 said that he would give up the post of party secretary-general at the party’s eighth congress, which is scheduled to begin Friday. Standing down would complete the move to turn control over to a younger generation of revolutionaries led by Miguel Díaz-Canel, who took over the presidency from Castro in 2018.

Many Cubans are anxious over the change after having their daily affairs guided for more than six decades by a Castro, and Raul Castro’s expected exit from the political scene couldn’t come at a more difficult time.

The coronavirus pandemic, painful financial reforms and restrictions re-imposed by the Trump administration have again brought food lines and shortages reminiscent of the “special period” that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. But unlike past crisis that brought Cubans together, concern is on the rise, fueled by the spread of the Internet and growing inequality that has laid bare the socialist system’s failings.

“We’ve lost an entire decade,” said Alina Lopez, a Havana historian who runs a blog that is a forum for leftist criticism of the government. “They don’t how to bring real change because any change must start with a lot of self-critique.”

At the previous Communist Party congress, in 2016, Castro announced that owing to the “inexorable laws of life,” he would step down as first secretary-general of the Communist Party in 2021 and yield power to Diaz-Canel. Also expected to resign at the gathering is Castro’s deputy, 90-year-old José Ramón Machado.

That would potentially leave the 17-member Politburo for the first time without any veterans of the guerrilla insurgency, or what many Cubans affectionately refer to as the “historic generation.”

William LeoGrande, an American University expert on Cuba, said such an outcome could greatly enhance Diaz-Canel’s ability to push through overdue reforms as part of a broader economic opening approved a decade ago.

In January, Diaz-Canel finally pulled the trigger on a plan approved two congresses ago to unify the island’s dual currency system, giving rise to fears of inflation. After the economy contracted 11% last year, he also threw the doors open to private enterprise that had been stamped out by state planning, permitting Cubans to legally operate almost any self-run businesses from their homes.

But authorities have yet to tackle what LeoGrande considers the elephant in the room — an overhaul of the bloated state-run companies and government agencies on which the vast majority of Cubans depend for their meager salaries and subsistence.

“They keep saying they will require the state enterprises to become profitable but that’s precisely where there’s resistance because the private sector isn’t growing fast enough,” said LeoGrande, who frequently conducts research in Cuba but hasn’t traveled there since prior to the pandemic. “Laying off a lot of people could lead to social and political problems.”

To be sure, any change in Cuba is likely to be slow. The word “continuity” scrawled in red is repeated multiple times on a giant billboard touting the party gathering erected in the same Revolutionary Plaza where Fidel Castro at his height in the 1960s and 1970s used to mesmerize Cubans with his anti-imperialist harangues.

But at least some on the island are agitating for more radical change. Hundreds of artists, some of them wrapped in the Cuban flag, have in recent months carried out anti-government protests.

Top leaders have tried to vilify the demonstrators, accusing them of being paid by exiles in Miami. But the movement has gained momentum thanks to the arrival of mobile internet service two years ago that has made it easier for dissidents to organize.

LeoGrande said the discontent running through Cuban society is about the basics of daily life, not political freedom and certainly not the rights of performance artists to wear the Cuban flag.

He says a bigger threat comes from the gaping inequality visible for the first time with the advent of special stores selling merchandise in dollars to the lucky few receiving hard currency from relatives abroad or who work in what, prior to the pandemic, had been a booming foreign tourism industry.

“Back in 1990s, there was a sense that we’re all in this together. There was no ostentation consumption,” said LeoGrande. “Today, the inequality is not only worse but it’s also more manifest.”

As always in Cuba’s history, the wildcard is the “Northern Empire,” as communist stalwarts refer to the U.S. This year’s congress, like the two before it, coincides with the anniversary of the 1961 invasion by CIA-funded Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs.

President Joe Biden campaigned on the promise to partially revive the Obama administration’s opening that saw the U.S. raise the American flag at its long-shuttered embassy in Havana, ease the decades-old trade embargo and boost air connections between the two countries. Most of those policies were reversed by Trump administration, which at the last minute even declared Cuba a state sponsor of terrorism despite having helped broker a peace deal between Colombia’s government and leftist rebels.

“Beyond tying to alleviate Cuba’s severe humanitarian conditions by removing remittance and travel restrictions, the Biden administration is likely to be very cautious in re-engaging Cuba,” said Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington. “The potential political costs of doing so are just much higher than the benefits.”

Associated Press writer Andrea Rodriguez reported this story in Havana and AP writer Joshua Goodman reported from Miami

Mexico would have had a significantly lower death toll if it had reacted as well as the average government, according to the University’s Institute for Global Health Sciences, which also released a report sharply critical of the U.S. response to COVID-19.

Mexico’s Health Department says there have been almost 210,000 deaths in the country of 126 million, but because so little testing is done, it acknowledges the real toll is around 330,000. The United States and Brazil have higher tolls, but much larger populations.

The failure by officials to recommend face masks, institute travel restrictions, provide enough testing and protective equipment and institute social distancing measures were among the mistakes cited by the report, which was commissioned by the World Health Organization’s Independent Panel to the Institute for Global Health.

“Key decisions about how to confront the health crisis were based on unwarranted assumptions, without sufficient evaluation and judgement of the risks,” according to the report, which cited excessive concentration of authority and “a government communication campaign that prioritized keeping up appearances, and partisan politics, before health.”

For example, Assistant Health Secretary Hugo López Gatell, who has acted as the government’s point-man in the pandemic, repeatedly said that wearing face masks did not protect people from catching COVID-19, even after evidence mounted that they did.

“It is no coincidence that countries with the worst performance in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic have populist leaders,” according to the report. “They have in common traits such as minimizing the severity of the condition, discouraging the use of face masks, prioritizing the economy over saving lives, and refusing to come together with political opponents to mount a coherent response.”

Neither López-Gatell nor the government has commented on the report.

Former health secretary José Narro said that “while it contains some inaccuracies, the truth is, (it is) very good.”

Throughout the pandemic, López-Gatell ridiculed mass testing as a waste of money and effort. The government also emphasized the promise that there were hospital beds available, when in fact the system was saturated in many places.

Austerity-minded President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has spoken with pride of not acquiring debt during the pandemic and not launching economic stimulus programs. But the report says that penny-pinching may have played a role in decisions not to expand testing, trace cases and quickly acquire PPE.

“From the outset, health authorities deemed efforts to stop or contain the virus futile and a waste of scarce resources, arguing instead for a mitigation approach and the preparation of the health system to care for the small minority that would require medical attention,” the report said.

But concentrating so much power in the hands of López-Gatell, an appointee of López Obrador, led the government to double-down on early mistakes.

The human cost of the missteps has been overwhelming.

“Every day I cry for my son, for the circumstances” in which he died, said Martha Méndez Guevara, whose son, television sports journalist José “Pepe” Roldán Méndez, 43, died of COVID-19 in June.

Mendez Guevara brought photos of her son and an urn with his ashes to Mexico City’s Basilica de Guadalupe Wednesday to have them blessed at an improvised shrine for pandemic victims.

She says she can’t judge whether authorities’ response to the pandemic was sufficient, in part because she never got to see her son after he was admitted to a government hospital in May. “We don’t know if they did enough for him, because we we were not allowed to visit him,” she said.

To be fair, the report notes that López Obrador’s administration had to contend with an already over-stretched health care system, and people’s “delays in seeking medical care out of fear that once admitted to a hospital, people would contract the disease or die.”

That meant many patients arrived at hospitals in advanced stages of the disease.

“The high prevalence of chronic diseases, in combination with suboptimal timeliness and quality of medical attention, have likely contributed to relatively high COVID-19 mortality among the non-elderly population in Mexico,” the report said, referring to Mexico’s very high levels of obesity and diabetes.

That also led to more deaths among younger patients; 50.6% of all COVID-19 death in Mexico occurred among people under 65 years old, compared to 18.7% in the United States.

The government said it would not institute mandatory face mask rules, strict lock-downs or travel bans, saying such moves would violate individual liberties. But the report noted the government failed to follow even its own rules, something it claimed that by February made Mexico City the second worst-hit metropolis in the world after Lima, Peru.

“Authorities’ miscalculations or tampering with the established epidemiological alert-system—which by December 4, signaled the highest level of risk—led them to postpone the reintroduction of strict restrictions in the city until December 18,” the report said, referring to a four-level scale based on case loads, hospitalizations and other measures that would have triggered business closures.

“By then, on the verge of the winter holidays, transmission had already spiraled,” it said.