In storm-hit Honduras, a climate crisis drives needs and fuels migration

Photo by Seth Berry

This piece originally appeared in The New Humanitarian

AS HONDURAS ENDURES it’s second storm in as many weeks, international aid agencies and local volunteer groups are scrambling the best responses they can to assist people displaced by flooding and landslides.

But aid experts and rights activists, as well as local residents and politicians, say longer-term problems are being neglected in a country where years of devastating drought have caused mass hunger and are leading thousands of Hondurans to flee annually towards the United States.

Yamely Cáceres was displaced from her Chamalecón neighbourhood in San Pedro Sula in northern Honduras after flooding from Hurricane Eta, and then prevented from returning due to resurgent floods from Hurricane Iota, which crashed through the region from 16-18 November. 

“People are losing everything,” Cáceres, who is now living under a highway overpass, told The New Humanitarian via WhatsApp. “They’re already losing so much with the El Niño droughts before this. I bet more and more people are going to leave after this.”

Green Devolution

Originally published in the Los Angeles Review of Books

VICTORIA DEL PORTETE, an Ecuadorian town, had decided the time had come for a vote.

Residents of the marshy Andean village came to the parish council building in 2011 to vote “yes” or “no” on the following question: are you in agreement with mining activity in the wetlands and watershed of Kimsacocha? The results, counted by hand, became undeniable by day’s end. Ninety-three percent of the participants said they didn’t want foreign gold extraction in the vicinity of their watershed. “No one and nothing will stop our fight in defense of water and in defense of our territories,” one organizer said afterward, “to construct a better Ecuador, without mining in our territories.”

Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa arrived at the village not long after with an entourage of apparatchiks and pro-government reporters. Correa reprimanded the anti-mining activists for their “lies,” painting the electoral outcome as the result of rural zealotry. Those who voted no, he said, suffered from “mental fundamentalisms.”

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