Covid-19 and climate change are making hurricanes more devastating for Latin America

After two Category 4 hurricanes this month, communities in these Central American countries have seen rivers overflowing with torrential rains, crops destroyed, livestock swept away, schools inundated and roads engulfed by landslides. Death, illness and poverty will likely follow.

While the rural poor have often been the hardest hit by the succession of Hurricane Eta and Hurricane Iota, the repercussions of these storms are already being felt in the corridors of power. In Guatemala City over the weekend, anger flooded the streets as protesters torched the Congress building, forcing lawmakers to reverse budget cuts to the country’s already crippled health and education systems.

“The risk of the spread of Covid-19 will only increase as more people seek refuge in shelters, already crowded with more than 17,500 Guatemalans in the wake of the latest storm,” Miriam Aguilar said last week , representative of Guatemala for the humanitarian organization Mercy Corps.

From Honduras, nutrition specialist Dr. Maria Angélica Milla asked her colleague to show CNN a makeshift evacuation shelter at a primary school in San Pedro Sula, where people could be seen without masks and guarded no safety distance. Cardboard boxes spread out on the floor – makeshift mattresses for so many families who have lost everything.

About 180 displaced people have taken refuge there, Milla added, and the coronavirus is often the least of their concerns. Hunger threatens, she said. Children who depended on a school meal don’t even get it, as schools have been closed due to the pandemic and more so now with hurricanes, she said.

Basic needs, such as shelter and clean water, are the most urgent needs for many, Mark Connolly also told CNN, UNICEF’s representative in Honduras.

Mirza Yolany Valdez, a full-time mother, lost everything in Hurricane Eta. Since then she has been in primary school with her two sons, aged 3 and 11, in San Pedro Sula.

“I’m just praying that God gives me strength because it’s super sad to come home and have nothing,” she told CNN on a video call.

Her voice broke and she began to cry. “With the first hurricane, I couldn’t save anything and now with the second, even less.”

‘Famine is coming’

“People don’t know where to go now,” says Leonardo Pineda, director of a local Honduran NGO, Asociación Juventud Siglo Veintiuno (JUSIVE) in San Pedro Sula.

He tells CNN he has heard a lot of young people talking about migration.

“There is no job, so what are people going to be working in? They are looking specifically for something to help them grow and in Honduras it is difficult,” said Pineda.

During the interview, a torrential downpour could be seen and heard in the background – the rains that make recovery efforts even more difficult.

Steve McAndrew, Red Cross deputy regional director for the Americas, described the scale and scale of the damage caused by the hurricane as “truly overwhelming” for CNN.

“We know from history we know from Hurricane Mitch and other major disasters like this that it only increases the desperation of people to look for better opportunities elsewhere,” he said. , referring to the 1998 storm so deadly that it became the basis for special U.S. immigration status. for Hondurans and Nicaraguans.

“It can certainly increase all of these pressures for people to move.”

In a meeting last week, Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei and Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández called on the world’s richest countries contributing directly to climate change to help their countries recover from hurricanes with financial assistance. This in turn would help alleviate a large northward migration flow, Giammattei said.

“Every time there is a natural disaster due to climate change, we go into debt,” Giammattei added. “It has caused a vicious cycle where we get into debt, we rebuild, we destroy it, we get into debt, we rebuild and we destroy it again.”

“Central America and Honduras are among the regions of the world most affected by climate change,” Honduran President Hernández said.

Dr Milla has no doubts that storms will trigger new waves of migration – the only option for some to survive “doomsday” devastation on the ground, she said.

“Famine is coming,” she told CNN. “So much famine is happening because the last crop has been lost, there is no more capacity to store anything, prices were already skyrocketing.”

“I don’t want to think about what’s going on in the minds of those who have lost everything,” Milla added. “Prepare for the waves.”