Climate Change Is Threatening to Exterminate the Wayúu People
Climate Change Is Threatening to Exterminate the Wayúu People
In northeastern Colombia, corruption, climate change and coal mining have collided to unleash a fatal drought.
By Daniel Macmillen Voskoboynik
Charred by the pulsing heat, the earth has turned to dust. Rivers have thinned to threads. Wells and ponds have parched. Across the sun-punished lands of Colombia’s La Guajira province, the northernmost point of South America, the symptoms of drought are stark.
Water carriers walk for hours, bucket handles digging into their hands. Goats and cows, grazing for absent pasture, stagger with protruding ribs. Families ration portions of turbid water.
At underfunded hospitals, emaciated infants on stretchers are fed rehydrating salts. Maryangel, a young doctor, shakes her head. “We’ve had pregnant mothers come in weighing less than 30 kilograms.”
Far from access to proper medical care, shovels cut the suffocated soil to make way for bodies. Government figures indicate that thousands of children here have died of malnutrition and preventable illnesses in the last few years. Many more die unregistered, without noise. “Why would you inform the state of the death of a person they have abandoned?” a father asks.
More:
https://psmag.com/climate-change-is-threatening-to-exterminate-the-way%C3%BAu-people-e79a1c7d33c4#.bqf2mn126
[center] 
[/center]
