"It's no surprise that we see ... tens of thousands of Guatemalans fleeing the country going into Mexico trying to get to the United States to flee a country that is in free-fall — where there are no guarantees and there is no security." Marie Burt, professor at George Mason University
Already suffering from climate change impacts such as hunger, thirst, diarrhea, vector-borne disease, Mayans are now facing extreme violence in their historical homeland of Guatemala.
There is a reason to be alarmed, according to the Houston Holocaust Museum, genocide has happened here before during the early 1980s. And there are some players still in the government today.
Over the next three years, the army destroyed 626 villages, killed or “disappeared” more than 200,000 people and displaced an additional 1.5 million, while more than 150,000 were driven to seek refuge in Mexico. Forced disappearance policies included secretly arresting or abducting people, who were often killed and buried in unmarked graves. In addition, the government instituted a scorched earth policy, destroying and burning buildings and crops, slaughtering livestock, fouling water supplies and violating sacred places and cultural symbols. Many of these actions were undertaken by the army, specifically through special units known as the Kaibiles, in addition to private death squads, who often acted on the advice of the army. The U.S. government often supported the repressive regimes as a part of its anti-Communist policies during the Cold War. The violence faced by the Mayan people peaked between 1978 and 1986. Catholic priests and nuns also often faced violence as they supported the rights of the Mayan people.
Today, the violence and murder of social and green activists is being perpetrated by trans-national corporations.
Maria Martin of NPR writes:
For three days last week, thousands of Guatemalans blocked roads and major highways to protest the Central American country's slide toward a constitutional crisis. The protest organizers included groups that have long demanded justice: indigenous communities and campesinos, as rural and farm workers are called.
Indigenous citizens, many dressed in colorful traditional clothing, came out partly to protest the Guatemalan president's recent expulsion of a United Nations-backed commission investigating corruption in the country. Since 2007, the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala, known by its Spanish initials CICIG and funded by the U.N., the United States and the European Union, has worked with Guatemalan justice agencies to target corrupt officials.
snip
The country's indigenous people therefore have a strong motivation to lobby for the rule of law. Maya communities bore the brunt of almost four decades of a civil war that ended in 1996, leaving over 200,000 casualties, the majority indigenous Guatemalans, according to the United Nations. Now the mostly Maya organizations and many human rights groups worry that the violence is making a comeback: In just the last year, 26 members of mostly indigenous campesino organizations have been killed.
snip
According to Velásquez, Guatemala has entered "a new stage of repression" — one focused on "assassinating community leaders who defend their territories from invasion by transnational companies bent on depriving indigenous peoples of the resources they have in the soil and the subsoil."
Numerous conflicts over land and mineral rights have surfaced in indigenous communities throughout Guatemala.
Gena Steffens writes a must-read for National Geographic. Changing climate forces desperate Guatemalans to migrate
Adverse climate conditions in Guatemala affect food security by reducing agricultural production in both commercial as well as subsistence farming, limiting the agricultural work opportunities that make up a significant portion of the national economy as well. Rising poverty rates and plunging social indicators paint a bleak outlook for the country, which has the fourth-highest level of chronic malnutrition in the world, and the highest in Latin America. According to the World Food Programme, nearly 50 percent of children under five years old are considered chronically malnourished in Guatemala, a measure that peaks to 90 percent or higher in many rural areas.
snip
Scientists attribute the unusually severe droughts starting in 2014 that have sped up the exodus of families heading north to effects from El Niño, part of a natural climate cycle known as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which causes swings between cooler and wetter, and hotter and drier periods around the globe.
This type of natural climate variability has affected Guatemala and other Central American countries for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, even playing a role in the mega-droughts that accompanied the collapse of the ancient Mayan civilization.
"Climate has always had a very strong variability here,” explains Edwin Castellanos, director of the Center for the Study of the Environment and Biodiversity at the Universidad del Valle in Guatemala. “The problem now is that El Niño and La Niña have become both stronger, more intense, but also more erratic.”
To Diego Recalde, director of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Guatemala, the current trend of mass migration in response to food insecurity and drought is a clear indication that the country has been barreling towards a climate change-induced crisis for some time.