Political instability, economic hardship, armed conflict and organized crime have all spurred social dislocation in Central America over the decades. But in recent years, weather-related disasters associated with climate change have become a prime cause, too, delivering hammer blows of the kind felt last year in Los Angelitos I and II, a pair of settlements at the base of a mountain near the Salvadoran capital of San Salvador.

On the night of Oct. 29, heavy rains triggered a mudslide in the municipality where the two settlements are located—Nejapa, which is 18 kilometers (11 miles) north of the capital. An avalanche thundered down Cerro El Picacho, a mountain that forms part of San Salvador Volcano, killing eight people as a wave of mud and related flooding obliterated Los Angelitos I and heavily damaged Los Angelitos II.

About 80 families were relocated by the government to existing, privately built housing in an urban area 21 kilometers (13 miles) west of Nejapa. Fewer than a dozen families have remained in the area, which was once the site of coffee and vegetable farming before giving way in recent decades to encroaching residential and commercial development.

Among these is Salvador Barahona, 63, who works in nearby cornfields during harvest season and doing construction jobs the rest of the year. Barahona did not move to the government-subsidized housing with his wife and small grandson who lives with them, finding the small units too cramped and the urban surroundings depressingly devoid of vegetation and open space. He has no family in the United States to lend him funds for the perilous trip north and to host him once there. So he has remained in his single-room home, which was not in the path of the avalanche and was located just high enough to avoid being swept away by floodwaters.

“We are poor and accustomed to living this way,” says Barahona, a friendly man with sun-worn skin. He would like to move to a less vulnerable, non-urban area elsewhere in the country if he could afford to. For the time being, he has decided to stay put and protect his few possessions, receiving occasional funds from his children to help him get by. “We are not looking for luxury or anything like that—just the right thing to do to get through the rain,” he adds. “Thank God there are no tornadoes here because [otherwise] I would be out in the open now.”

Climate-related calamities in Central America ranging from community-crushing mudslides and floods to crop-shriveling droughts are gaining attention mainly because of the increased outmigration they’re causing, particularly to the United States. But those who make the trek north are only part of the picture. Countless others who bear the brunt of extreme weather events but can’t afford that journey must, like Salvador Barahona, stay and try to reassemble their lives as best they can.

International experts say the pressures causing such dislocation in the region will only increase as global temperatures—and the incidence of volatile weather events—continue to climb. In May, the Norwegian Refugee Council, a nongovernmental humanitarian group, ranked Honduras fifth behind the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cameroon, Burundi and Venezuela on the list of the world’s most neglected displacement crises of 2020. The Council specifically cited Eta and Iota—the back-to-back hurricanes that struck Central America in November of last year, affecting three million people in Honduras and taking a heavy toll as well on Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. It said the wind and flood damage exacerbated ongoing dislocation caused by earlier extreme weather events as well as by chronic food insecurity, gang- and gender-based violence and economic recession in the wake of Covid-19.

The United Nations’ agency that provides guidance and services on migration worldwide is highlighting the problem, too. In a report issued in May, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) noted that in Guatemala, the hurricanes displaced 36% of the population, or roughly 970,000 people, in Verapaz and Huehuetenango, the country’s two largest departments. An IOM survey found that two-thirds of those displaced people reported damage to their homes from the hurricanes’ winds, floods or both. One out of 10 surveyed households in the two departments said they would try to leave the country in the coming year, the IOM said. Small wonder that two months after the storms struck, a so-called caravan of some 6,000 Hondurans began traveling north through Guatemala in hopes of reaching the United States.

“Emergencies caused by natural events or consequences of climate change act as a trigger in the deterioration of the livelihoods of this population, which can affect mobility decisions,” the IOM said in its report.

It is understandably difficult to pinpoint exactly when climate-change impacts became a significant factor in Central American social dislocation and migration. Elizabeth Kennedy, an independent, U.S.-born researcher based in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, reckons the trend began taking shape in 1998, the year Hurricane Mitch pummeled the region. She says sociologists began studying the phenomenon formally in 2015, when the coffee rust disease known as la roya—a plant-killing plague scientists have associated with higher temperatures in the region—devastated Central American coffee plantations. Economic hardship caused by coffee rust, by the prolonged droughts in subsequent years and by last year’s hurricanes have contributed substantially to successive waves of population displacement and migration, she says.

“Aside from the problem of territorial vulnerability, the governments are corrupt and have not supported people in the construction of infrastructure needed to mitigate [climate-change] risk,” says Kennedy.

Experts cite a procession of past drivers of displacement and migration in the region. These include the decline of Central America’s agro-export model beginning in the 1960s and the armed conflicts that ravaged Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua starting in the 1960s. Lately there has been a multiplicity of co-occurring causes, a situation that has produced what Úrsula Roldán Andrade, a researcher at Guatemala’s Rafael Landívar University, describes as “migration for mixed reasons.” She says that in the 2010s, critical components in that mix have been economic and safety concerns stemming from spiraling crime, corruption, violence and generalized institutional decay.

Analysts have now come to view climate as a prominent factor, too, citing the greater frequency of extreme weather events. Nina Lakhani, a reporter for The Guardian with long experience in migration coverage, notes that only six months before last November’s hurricanes, El Salvador and Guatemala had been hit hard by two tropical storms, Amanda and Cristóbal. Indeed, scientists say the Central American isthmus’s exposure to weather from both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans makes the region particularly vulnerable to climate-change impacts such as drought, sea-level rise and storms that are more frequent and intense.

This vulnerability has only been amplified by land-use practices, such as deforestation and scattershot development, that have destroyed watershed woodlands and marshes that would otherwise absorb and naturally steward rainwater. (See "Rains reveal emergency- and land-planning needs" —EcoAméricas, July 2020 and "Storms, again, point up need for land restoration" —EcoAméricas, November 2020.) And improving land-use practices—a daunting enough challenge given the powerful economic interests involved—is particularly tricky in a context of weak public institutions, rampant corruption and poor regulatory oversight in the licensing of development projects.

The role of climate change in displacement and migration has become a fact, says Adrián Martínez, director of La Ruta del Clima, a Costa Rican nongovernmental group that promotes citizen involvement in climate issues. “The connection between climate change and human mobility has a causal nexus,” says Martínez, who coauthored the book “Human Mobility: Human Rights and Climate Justice” for the nonprofit Heinrich Böll Foundation of Germany. “…[It] occurs as part of the decision-making process. This cannot be denied.”

Disproportionately affecting indigenous communities
Among those bearing the brunt of these impacts are Central America’s indigenous peoples, many of whom live in remote locations devoid of the public services that might bring relief in the wake of extreme weather events. Such weather only adds to existing pressure on them to leave their land—much of it from ranchers, loggers and drug traffickers encroaching on indigenous territories in the absence of law enforcement, clearing forests and threatening violence as they advance.

Researchers say indigenous Central Americans account for a disproportionately large number of migrants from the region. The book “Human Mobility: Human Rights and Climate Justice” cites an Inter-American Institute of Human Rights report that says 53.3% of Guatemalans deported to their country in the first two months of 2017 for illegally entering Mexico and the United States were indigenous Mayans. In addition, the report says 56% of displaced Guatemalans who have lived for a long period in Mexico identify themselves as indigenous people.

Part of the explanation lies in La Mosquitia, which runs along the Caribbean coast from the eastern Honduran department of Gracias a Dios to the northeastern Nicaraguan communities of Bluefields and Las Perlas. The heavily forested area, also known as the Miskito Coast, is home to extensive wilderness and to indigenous peoples including the Miskitos, Tawahka, Pesh and Nahua, as well as the Garifuna, people of mixed African and Amerindian origin. But increasingly, the indigenous communities are facing a destructive influx of large-scale farming and ranching operations, as well as drug-trafficking activity—all of which are causing deforestation, notes anthropologist Ronny Velásquez of the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH).

Velásquez says the resulting social displacement has been aggravated by extreme weather events such as Eta and Iota, which devasted the Miskito Coast. He has documented waves of displacement in the region dating from the arrival there in the 1980s of the Contras, U.S.-funded paramilitaries seeking to overthrow Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. He says the current cycle is due to last year’s hurricanes and ongoing incursions by cattle ranchers and loggers. The land grabbers, he says, go on to clear ostensibly protected forests and force indigenous families to leave, often threatening to kill them if they don’t.

“At the beginning of this year people were murdered [in the Honduran portion of the Miskito Coast] and their lands were taken from them,” Velásquez says. “The same thing is occurring in Nicaragua because farm and ranch operators are entering indigenous territory and killing [local residents].”

As if the increasingly volatile weather and destructive human encroachment is not damaging enough, comparatively scant social-support services in Honduran La Mosquitia put all the more pressure on the region’s residents. Even amid the Covid-19 pandemic, the population of 150,000 is served by one regional hospital as well as two maternal and child clinics that are currently closed due to a shortage of medications. One of those clinics also suffered severe hurricane damage, but donations made to the government to repair it—a total of seven million lempiras (US$290,000)—have yet to be disbursed by the Honduran Health Secretariat to start the work.

Critics say the Honduran government has made the region more vulnerable in proactive ways, too. They cite the government’s recent designation of several La Mosquitia areas of archeological interest as “public-use zones.” The move ostensibly aims to allow sustainable extraction of natural resources such as timber in these areas, but green advocates fear it will be used to hasten the eviction of indigenous communities from their traditional lands.

On the other side of the Central American isthmus, similar drivers of social dislocation are at work. In the Central American Dry Corridor—the tropical dry-forest region that runs down the Pacific coast from southern Mexico to Panama—weather can be volatile and is forecast to become increasingly so due to climate change. Home to an estimated 10.5 million people, 60% of them impoverished, the corridor is experiencing extraordinary drought as well as periods of unusually intense rainfall over an ever-larger area, scientists say.

UNAH’s Velásquez aims to document the displacement of people in the Honduran portion of the Dry Corridor. He fears that the government’s lack of action to address the trend there and in La Mosquitia could be a result of pressure from Honduran economic interests to dispossess indigenous communities of their lands.

How climate change and other factors will ultimately affect migration patterns in the coming years remains a matter of debate. Looking ahead to 2030, a report drafted by the International Organization for Migration offered four worldwide scenarios. One calls for firm borders and reduced mobility, another for inclusive and sustainable development that values migration, and yet another for planned, high-tech economies with little demand for migrant workers. In the fourth, most dire scenario, nations collapse and people migrate en masse in order to survive—a flight for survival that Ursula Roldán Andrade believes was previewed in the wave of Honduran migration earlier this year.

Divvying up impact responsibility
The degree to which climate effects will themselves contribute to social displacement in Central American countries is difficult to gauge as well. While the phenomenon is now considered a significant factor, it is not easy to measure, much less address. Complicating the latter challenge is how responsibility should be divided up between countries that “send” migrants abroad and countries most responsible for the greenhouse-gas emissions that are driving climate change. Adrián Martínez suggests such questions have not been adequately explored due to reluctance on the part of the world’s leading economic powers to assume responsibility for climate change impacts.

“The international community is aware of the problem, but there is no feasible answer in this situation from a human-rights perspective,” Martínez says. “Climate change can’t be attributed to indigenous people, and climate-change adaptation has political and economic limits.”

Elizabeth Kennedy says she is encouraged by the fact that in the past two years, Central American migrants have been granted asylum at an increasing rate in the United States. This, she says, has been due in part to work that the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) has been doing to document climate-change impacts on communities in the region.

Kennedy believes responsibility for addressing social displacement in Central America should be shared by “sending” countries and nations that have contributed to climate change.

“The countries that have done the most damage to the environment should assume their responsibility,” she says, “but the Central American governments need to address this problem, because for years they have received financing to rebuild their countries after each hurricane, and the money has gone into the pockets of politicians.”