Across Western Guatemala, Climate Driving Migration: Frosts, Floods, Pests Never Seen Before
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The western highlands, which extend from Antigua to the Mexican border, cover roughly twenty per cent of Guatemala and contain a large share of the country’s three hundred microclimates, ranging from dank, tropical locales near the Pacific Coast to the arid, alpine reaches of the department of Huehuetenango. The population in the highlands is mostly indigenous, and people’s livelihoods are almost exclusively agrarian. The malnutrition rate, which hovers around sixty-five per cent, is among the highest in the Western Hemisphere. In 2014, a group of agronomists and scientists, working on an initiative called Climate, Nature, and Communities of Guatemala, produced a report that cautioned lawmakers about the region’s susceptibility to a new threat. The highlands region, they wrote, “was the most vulnerable area in the country to climate change.”
In the years before the report was published, three hurricanes had caused damage that cost more than the previous four decades’ worth of public and private investment in the national economy. Extreme-weather events were just the most obvious climate-related calamities. There were increasingly wide fluctuations in temperature—unexpected surges in heat followed by morning frosts—and unpredictable rainfall. Almost half a year’s worth of precipitation might fall in a single week, which would flood the soil and destroy crops. Grain and vegetable harvests that once produced enough food to feed a family for close to a year now lasted less than five months. “Inattention to these issues,” the report’s authors wrote, can drive “more migration to the United States” and “put at grave risk the already deteriorating viability of the country.”
Guatemalan migration to the U.S., which had been steady since the late nineteen-seventies, has spiked in recent years. In 2018, fifty thousand families were apprehended at the border—twice as many as the year before. Within the first five months of the current fiscal year, sixty-six thousand families were arrested. The number of unaccompanied children has also increased: American authorities recorded twenty-two thousand children from Guatemala last year, more than those from El Salvador and Honduras combined. Much of this migration has come from the western highlands, which receives not only some of the highest rates of remittances per capita but also the greatest number of deportees. Of the ninety-four thousand immigrants deported to Guatemala from the U.S. and Mexico last year, about half came from this region.
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Even approaches that have accounted for the root causes of regional mass migration have underestimated the impact of climate change. The Obama Administration pledged roughly seven hundred and fifty million dollars to the northern triangle of Central America, an aid package known as the Alliance for Prosperity, which aimed to address mounting poverty, political corruption, and cycles of crime and violence. Little of that money dealt with issues of environmental sustainability, however, even though half of the Guatemalan workforce is in the agricultural sector. Sebastian Charchalac, an agronomist and environmental consultant who headed the Climate, Nature, and Communities project in the western highlands until 2017, told me, “It’s like the State Department is looking at the fire, but not the kindling.” The day after Palacios and I visited Quilinco, I headed farther north with an agronomist named Silvia Monterroso, who worked for an organization in Huehuetenango called FundaEco. Monterroso has lived in the area for more than twenty years and had close relationships with a number of families along the road to the city of Todos Santos. En route, we passed a cemetery with a series of gravestones and sepulchres painted ornately with American flags, an indication that the deceased had died as immigrants in the U.S. “It’s a symbol of thanks,” Monterroso told me. “The family of the person who died is thanking those who left, because if they hadn’t left for the U.S. and sent money home, the family would have nothing.”
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https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/how-climate-change-is-fuelling-the-us-border-crisis
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