Three changes, a pair of sandals, boxer shorts, toothpaste, body soap, and $ 7,000. That was the only thing the Vázquez brothers, ages 13 and 17, packed in their backpacks to go from Choloma, Honduras, to the United States. They were alone and in a coyote with half a hundred strangers. Emigrating was the only option for these children, after the cyclones Eta and Iota flood your municipality. The aerial images of this, a year ago, went around the world. In them, entire families were distinguished living on the rooftops while the mud and rivers of chocolate-colored water filled everything; including the house of this family of farmers, which today is only a handful of walls corroded by humidity and the chicken coop for the few birds that were left alive.
For Maritza Argelia Gómez, their mother, everything happened too quickly. “In the blink of an eye they stopped living with me,” he says from what used to be the entrance to his house; a space of orange colors from which hung a dozen medals for the best student in the class of his eldest son, Anderson Jovan Vázquez, now 18 years old. “I feel like a useless father. It is sad that a son tells one that he wants to study and I tell him ‘I can’t’ ”, says Justino Vázquez, while sucking some tears that, for months, have not stopped.
In early November, the Central American region was hit by the hurricane Eta, category 4, out of 5. Three weeks later, it was Iota, category 5, a phenomenon classified as “catastrophic” and “extremely dangerous” by the National Hurricane Center (NHC), which ended with what little the former left standing. According to Unicef, affected 9.3 million people, in seven countries in the area. More than 3.5 million were children. Since then, migration and humanitarian aid have become the only way out for thousands of Central Americans who saw their homes lost in the mud and rain. The relocations and alternatives of the public administration were reduced to promises that sound more and more distant.
Justino decided to send them to Los Angeles where his sister lives as an irregular resident. And to facilitate the formalities of schooling, they had to give them up for adoption. “There are no opportunities for anything here,” he ditch. With the little savings they had and the sale of the car, they managed to set aside the money they were asking for to cross them illegally. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) estimates that more than a million people had to be displaced by the impact of these two storms. Sibylla Brodzinsky, spokesperson for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Central America and Mexico assures that the hurricanes “became another factor, adding to the chronic violence and socioeconomic difficulties in the region”: “All this is behind forced migration ”. Asylum applications in Mexico are, according to the entity, a clear indicator. Although Hondurans have held the top spot for the past three years, the number of applications doubled from 2020 (15,398) to 2021 (31,894). Haiti, Cuba and El Salvador are next on the list.
People took out the elderly in refrigerators, because they did not know how to swim. The rain sounded very harsh and children could be heard screaming. Oh, so soggy and shivering from the cold! We lost everything …
Ana Isolina Esquivel, 66, affected by storms
For Carlos Rosales, Oxfam Honduras humanitarian officer, the resources to prevent the forced exodus have not just arrived: “Although the Government has drawn up a Response and Recovery Plan, there is still a lack of guidance in the selection of families and there are not enough investments in recovery or support for livelihoods or psychosocial. With this breeding ground, moving internally or migrating is a natural option ”. Like them, there are 17 million inhabitants in Latin America who are at risk of being displaced by the effects of climate change in 2050. The international entity deployed the program ECHO Top Up, with European funds, through which 1,075 families were helped, with transfers of 18 euros per vulnerable member and another 740 were equipped with a water filter.
Still not enough
Eta and Iota destroyed and affected more than 91,000 homes in Honduras, leaving 4,566,753 people affected, according to the Permanent Contingency Commission of Honduras (Copeco). And agricultural losses reached 80%, according to the report of the Minister of Agriculture and Livestock Mauricio Guevara. “There has not been a catastrophe like it since Mitch (in 1998, with more than 14,000 deceased) ”, Óscar Mencia, Copeco’s National Deputy Commissioner, explained through a video call. “We know the needs of our people and we have been alleviating them as best we could. The Government started a care program but it is not enough. Still missing; it is not enough ”, he acknowledges. However, he regrets that the relocation processes are still in process: “We are faced with populations that had these inheritance lands and do not want to leave their areas.”
This is the difficulty that neighboring institutions also suffer from. David de León, spokesman for the National Coordinator for Disaster Reduction of Guatemala, assures that his administration “is still in talks with the communities”: “They never stopped being a priority, but relocating families with so many years of roots and farms that they are their sustenance to a different place is a very complex process ”. In Guatemala, today there are 61 deceased, 61 disappeared and 455 affected schools. The registry of people with a housing alternative was not transferred to this medium.
The Vázquez family’s plan is to emigrate with their children. “What else are we going to do here?” Asks the father. “Look at those bordos (elevation of land to retain water), they are too vulnerable. What if we start again and another comes hyena (flood)?”. And the mother adds: “Help arrived, yes. But, a year later we continue like this. They forgot about us. We can only have faith. God knows why he does things”.
In the village of Montañuela, in the lowlands of Choloma, there is a family for whom migrating was not even an option. “I never imagined it would be a hyena as vast as the one that came to us “, narrates Norma Elisabeth Pineda, 47. She earned about 300 euros a month selling homemade food and desserts and a couple of months ago they had asked for a loan to change the roof of the house and” put it prettier”. However, this was the first Eta; It was the closest to the Chamelecón River, which overflowed the night of November 4 and destroyed everything. “Since then, living has been very difficult.”
They managed to flee a couple of days before, but were left homeless, jobless and with a huge debt to pay. “I can’t go, but I would like,” he says. Due to his morbid obesity, making such a dangerous and long journey to the United States is unthinkable. In addition, her husband suffers from diabetes and chronic unbearable leg pain. “We are not going to be able to leave here. We have to start from scratch ”, they say. Now they live in a rental house in the same neighborhood, with three other families. The only thing they have from their previous life is Norma’s hammock, a cauldron, and two sets of clothes.
“We lost everything”
In Guatemala, the most shaken areas are easily distinguished. Repaired or not, most houses have a sealed horizontal line that remembers how far the water and mud have reached. Most of these marks are above the windows. The scenarios change from one country to another, but the feeling of those affected by the cyclones is the same: “They forgot us.” November was the cursed month for 66-year-old Ana Isolina Esquivel. It rained incessantly even in the Guatemalan community of Sebol, in Izabal. The Esquivel house, now two-colored, is one of the highest and was the refuge of many who arrived with fear that “the water would catch them”. But here it also came.
“People used to take out the elderly in refrigerators, because they did not know how to swim and it was impossible to walk. The water reached our waists and then our necks, ”says the grandmother of 30 grandchildren and great-grandmother of two, still anguished. “I remember that the rain sounded very harsh and that you could also hear the children screaming. Oh so soaked and shivering from the cold! We, thank God, took refuge in a church. I knelt on the ground to pray and only listened to the sound of the water below. We lost everything ”. Two months after living between the parish and a makeshift shelter they returned. The mud was still thigh high. “I was fingering things in the kitchen: ‘Ah, this is a pot, ah, this is a fork.’ So it was that we rescued some things. Others, who knows where they were … “.
A year later, the family only thinks about how to feed themselves. At the entrance to the façade, there are a dozen nets full of the first corn crop after the disaster. “Most of it is for self-consumption, but with what we sell we will buy chick and eggs”Says the husband, Anselmo Ramírez, 70, staring blankly. “I no longer have the strength in my body to work more. But I’m ashamed of not having to feed them ”.
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