Trump regime and its Fox proxies have greeted the caravan with hostility that has included anti-Semitic conspiracy theorizing about who organized it, Islamaphobic nonsense about ISIS terrorists concealed in its numbers, and the usual racist tropes about the alleged evils of brown people. And now the plan is to greet however many of their dwindling and exhausted numbers make it to the border with several thousand well-armed U.S. soldiers.
Central American migrants on their march towards the US have regularly been described as either fleeing gang violence or extreme poverty. Yet there is now a factor at work that is worsening the vile social conditions of poverty and violence: climate change.
Central American migrants on their march towards the US have regularly been described as either fleeing gang violence or extreme poverty. Yet there is now a factor at work that is worsening the vile social conditions of poverty and violence: climate change.
“The focus on violence is eclipsing the big picture – which is that people are saying they are moving because of some version of food insecurity,” said Robert Albro, a researcher at the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University. “The main reason people are moving is because they don’t have anything to eat. This has a strong link to climate change – we are seeing tremendous climate instability that is radically changing food security in the region.” Migrants don’t often specifically mention “climate change” as a motivating factor for leaving because the concept is so abstract and long-term, Albro said. But people in the region who depend on small farms are painfully aware of changes to weather patterns that can ruin crops and decimate incomes. Climate change is bringing more extreme and unpredictable weather to the region: summer rainfall is starting later and has become more irregular. Drought fuelled by El Niño has gripped much of Central America over the past four years, but the period has been occasionally punctuated by disastrous flooding rains.
As a result, more than 3 million people have struggled to feed themselves.
A study of Central American migrants by the World Food Program last year found that nearly half described themselves as food insecure.
“This is the worst drought we’ve ever had,” says Méndez López, from Guatamala. “We’ve lost absolutely everything. If things don’t improve, we’ll be forced to migrate somewhere else. We can’t go on like this.”
Guatemala is consistently listed among the world’s 10 most vulnerable nations to the effects of climate change. Increasingly erratic climate patterns have produced year after year of failed harvests and dwindling work opportunities across the country. Data from Customs and Border Patrol show a massive increase in the number of Guatemalan migrants, particularly families and unaccompanied minors, intercepted at the U.S. border starting in 2014. It’s not a coincidence that the leap coincides with the onset of severe El Niño-related drought conditions in Central America’s Dry Corridor, which stretches through Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.
A third of all employment in Central America is linked to agriculture, so any disruption to farming practices can have devastating consequences. The UN World Food Programme (WFP) interviewed families from key districts in the Dry Corridor about the pressures that are forcing them to leave. The main “push factor” identified was not violence, but drought and its consequences: no food, no money, and no work. Entire villages seem to be collapsing from the inside out as more and more communities become stranded, hours away from the nearest town, with no food, no work, and no way to seek help. When subsistence farmers lose their harvests, they’re forced to purchase the staples they typically grow—often at highly inflated prices—to feed their families. Without a source of income, this additional expense leaves many without the economic resources for other basic necessities such as medications or transportation to doctors.
As hunger pushes desperate parents to resort to extreme measures in order to feed their families, robberies and violent assaults have skyrocketed. “People from our own community are starting to go out and rob people, because it’s their only option,” says Marco Antonio Vásquez, a community leader of the village of El Ingeniero in Chiquimula.
Many consider migration to be their last option, one that comes with tremendous risks to their personal security and unthinkable consequences if they’re unable to complete the journey.
“A lot of people are leaving, many more than ever before,” says Vásquez. “Towards the U.S. in search of a new future, taking their small children with them because they feel so pressured to risk it all.”
“There’s no transportation. People have run out of money to pay the fare, so cars don’t even come here anymore,” says José René Súchite Ramos of El Potrerito, Chiquimula. “We want to leave but we can’t.”
Farmers first migrate to urban areas, where they confront a new set of problems, which in turn prompt them to consider an international odyssey.
“There’s an internal movement where someone will go to, say, Guatemala City and then perhaps get extorted by a gang and then move to the US,” said Stephanie Leutert, an expert in Central American migration at the University of Texas. “When they get here they will say they’ve moved because of violence – but climate change was the exacerbating factor.”
Coffee used to be worth something, but it’s been seven years since there was a decent price. Also, Central America have been ravaged by an epidemic called leaf rust, which has affected 70% of farms. Warmer nights are allowing it to thrive, said Sam Dupre, a researcher at the University of Maryland Baltimore County “One of the things I found was that people, largely because they weren’t able to pay their debts, to get money for food, they started to migrate,” Dupre said. “People were telling me before the coffee leaf rust hit, we didn’t migrate. Now we do. It’s normal.”
During the past decade, an average of 24 million people each year were displaced by weather events around the world, and experts expect this number to continue to rise. Studies indicate that the world may see 140 million to 200 million climate refugees between now and 2050. And like other climate-related studies, these figures may be greatly underestimated.
Those Central Americans who flee know that there is a little chance they will be allowed into the United States—neither the internationally recognised 1951 Refugee Convention nor U.S. law have provisions for giving climate change refugees asylum.
“If your farm has been dried to a crisp or your home has been inundated with water and you’re fleeing for your life, you’re not much different from any other refugee,” said Michael Doyle, an international relations scholar at Columbia University. “The problem is that other refugees fleeing war qualify for that status, while you don’t.”
Yet perhaps millions more will flee Central America headed to the United States. Anybody who thinks this can be handled by deploying the Army to the border is as delusional as those in power who still deny that human-caused climate change is even happening. We are beginning to see the real-world effects of climate change around the world.
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