How's this for something "betcha didn't see coming"?

The Guatemalan Minister of Governance Enrique Degenhart is calling out the Mexican government for its role in the migrant crisis.

During a sit-down interview, he told The Daily Caller's Stephanie Hamill that Mexico is incentivizing Guatemalans and others from Central American countries to leave their homes by offering different kinds of benefits to them like work permits and visas while they migrate north toward the United States.

The Daily Caller's exclusive is a breath of fresh air in the current migrant debate, because the Guatemalan official is pointing out that his country is not the hellhole it's regularly depicted as in the press.  And second, the migrant crisis is a manufactured crisis, made in Mexico, the very country President Trump forced to play ball on migration over the weekend.

Should there really be a migrant crisis from Central America, a region that actually cannot afford to lose as many people as it is?  Or is someone pushing things for his own purposes?

Yet to read the press accounts, Central America is a place so horrible that everyone must flee from it just to remain alive.  Pay no attention to the fact that people fleeing are paying the very cartels they are supposedly fleeing and entrusting themselves to their tender mercies.  Nope, the places are hellholes, and asylum in the U.S. is the only answer, because no one can live in such a place.  The choppers of gangs and poverty will devour the illegal migrants crossing our border otherwise.  Anyone saying "no" to such migrants is racist and wicked.

Actually, the place, in varying degrees, is pretty good.  Most of the countries of Central America have democracy, free trade, use of the U.S. dollar, significant industry, favorable geography, good economies, good demographics, and everything they actually need to succeed.  They might benefit by unifying their states more, some could use more investment, and most could step up their education and corruption-fighting efforts.  But nations such as Guatemala, far from being dumps, have a lot going for them.  Here's the World Bank screen shot chart I found earlier:

The fact that Venezuela really is the sort of a place that millions of people flee for their lives from and the fact that that's going on right now stands to give the lie to that nonsense about Guatemala.  Some Venezuelans actually flee to places like Guatemala, which is a paradise compared to the true hellhole they left behind.

And now the Guatemalan official reports that the migrant exodus coming from his country is generally the work of artificial enticements and false promises about all the bennies available in the United States of America, coming from Mexico.  In other words, someone stands to make money off human-trafficking, and Guatemalans are the marks.  Those someones just happen to have links enough to Mexico's government to ensure that Guatemalans and others coming illegally have jobs, visas, and the red carpet rolled out starting from their Mexico leg of the tour.

In short, it all sounds as though the Mexican cartels have an undue hand in government.  Sound plausible?

What's interesting here now is the possibility that Guatemala will seek to put the squeeze on Mexico, if for nothing else, to keep the country from emptying out.  It would be an impressive thing to see the Guatemalans give Mexico the one-two right after Trump did the first one.  Maybe this is what it is going to take to force Mexico to confront its criminality problem.