Friday, December 04, 2020

The Central American Climate Refugees

 Back-to-back hurricanes Eta and Iota internally displaced more than half a million people in Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua, according to International Organization for Migration data. The U.N. agency said at least a third could be displaced for more than three months, hampering their ability to earn a living and rebuild their lives. Even before the storms, Central American nations were reeling from economic crises brought on by the pandemic and mass unemployment led to a steady increase in migration north.

“Every day, about 20 new people arrive because they lost their land, their homes, and their crops in Honduras and Guatemala,” said Gabriel Romero, the director of a migrant shelter in the southern Mexican city of Tenosique.

Salgado had already been struggling to eke out a profit after measures to curb the novel coronavirus such as additional cleaning cut into his meager revenues. But the destruction of Hurricane Eta in early November left him in debt and unable to feed his three children. So he set out with three neighbors to try to cross Guatemala, then Mexico and eventually find work in the United States.

“First the pandemic, and then the hurricane ... we have no money for our children,” he said on the journey north.

Honduran farmer David Tronches said he had no choice but to migrate after Eta’s deluge flooded the corn and bean fields he’d sown to feed his family, including an infant daughter.

“We plant and harvest to sell and to have enough to eat,” said Tronches, speaking from a makeshift migrant shelter in the northern Mexican city of Saltillo. “Without the harvest, what are we going to sell? How are we going to eat?”

Riccy Martinez, 25, who said she also lost her home in the floods, shook her head. “You’ll see how many people are going to start coming because they lost their homes,” she said.

Thousands more Central Americans say they’re planning to join northbound caravans with names like “Caravan for Flood victims” scheduled to begin departing from Honduras in the coming weeks.

Julio Almendarez, a resident of San Pedro Sula suburb Chamelecon in Honduras, said he was forced to flee to a storm shelter after a river burst its banks during Iota. While inside the shelter, he said, he and hundreds of other displaced residents held a meeting and decided to form a caravan to leave Honduras on Dec. 10 with the aim of reaching the United States.

“I decided to leave because we lost everything,” he said.

Giovanni Bassau, the regional representative of the U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR), said there has been gang activity, including violence and extortion, inside the storm shelters in cities where such semi-organized crime has long held sway, and that he expects the hurricanes to worsen the instability that allows such groups to flourish.

“If you have a community that is run, to some degree, by the gangs, all you’re doing when you add shelters and flooding is making things worse,” Bassau said. “It leaves people with really no choice except to flee,” he said.

 Biden has promised a $4 billion plan to address underlying factors driving migration from Central America. Refugees International says such relief, while welcome, will take years to have an impact.

'We lost everything:' Central Americans flee north after back-to-back hurricanes | Reuters

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