Dry corridors

Less than a mile south of the US-Mexico border, in Sasabe, Mexico, a Guatemalan man named Giovanni (whose first name is used to protect his undocumented status) propped up his feet while an EMT applied antibiotic ointment to his feet in the shade of a cottonwood.

Giovanni left his home country because of a catastrophic drought and was attempting to unite with his brothers who were already in Dallas. After trying to cross the border into the Arizona desert, his feet were ravaged: discolored, covered in gashes and tender red blisters. One toenail had been ripped off. Across the arroyo, or dry wash, were about 30 more prospective border crossers, primarily Guatemalan, some awaiting a similar medical checkup, others stocking up on water and food.

It was July, and several days before in a 110-degree heat wave, he had crossed the border with a small group of about five other people from Guatemala. After 14 hours, they ran out of water. After 21 hours, Giovanni gave up and turned back alone. He had no water, no food, and quickly lost his orientation, but he made it back to Sasabe.

Giovanni is part of a Central American exodus of people that has been increasing for decades. The recent caravans are the most recent chapter. And while there are complex and compounding reasons for the massive displacements and migrations – especially rising violence (in places like Honduras, for example, after the 2009 military coup) and systemic poverty – there is another driver behind the movement of people seeking refuge in the US: climate change.

As the EMT tenderly wrapped an adhesive bandage around Giovanni’s feet, Giovanni told me about the droughts back in his home of San Cristobal Frontera. It hadn’t rained for “40 days and 40 nights”, he said. The crops in the milpas – subsistence farm plots of corn, beans, and squash – were wilting, and the harvests failing. The cattle were skinny and dying of starvation. Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador lie in the trajectory of the so-called ‘dry corridor’ of Central America that stretches from Southern Mexico to Panama. This epithet is a recently adopted description of the region, to describe the droughts that have risen in intensity and frequency over the last 10 years.

Most members of the human caravans are from these three ‘dry corridor’ countries.

According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, “Families and communities have already started to suffer from disasters and the consequences of climate change”. From 2008 to 2015, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre reported that at least 22.5 million had been displaced per year because of climate-related-events, the equivalent of 62,000 people per day. Over this time, environmental forces uprooted more people than war. And in 2017 alone, disasters displaced 4.5 million people in the Americas.

In September, the World Food Programme essentially confirmed what Giovanni had told me earlier that summer in Sasabe. According to reporting by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the WFP said, “Poor harvests caused by drought in Central America could leave more than two million people hungry” and “climate change was creating drier conditions in the region.” In July, El Salvador declared a red alert as the drought affected 77,000 corn farmers, and Honduras reported that as much as 80 percent of its maize and bean crops were lost. The accumulated losses of these crops exceeded 694,366 acres in Guatemala and El Salvador. This summer’s devastating losses came after other recent, hard-hitting dry spells, particularly from 2014 to 2016, that had already left millions on the brink of hunger.

As climate scientist Chris Castro told me in 2017, Central America is ground zero for climate change in the Americas. Among the thousands of people caravanning north are climate refugees.

This article has been excerpted from: ‘Why the Migrant Caravan Story Is a Climate Change Story’.

Courtesy: Counterpunch.org