× Expand Jeff Abbott Farmer Aldana García looks over his ailing corn plants, struggling in Guatemala’s forty-day drought. Irrigation for many small landholders is not an option.

Riding in the back of the weathered early 1990s Toyota pickup to the tiny village of Pinalito, Guatemala recently, there are only two topics of conversation among the passengers: the car that went off the road earlier that morning, and the continuation of the drought. The passengers see solutions to the car, but the drought has them worried.

We are in the Guatemalan department (an administrative region like a province or state) of Chiquimula, where it has not rained for forty days, as it hasn’t in sixteen of Guatemala’s twenty-two departments. The Guatemalan government estimates that the 2018 drought has negatively impacted more than 200,000 families.

Yet in reality, the drought affects far more of the country than the government admits.

“This is a total disaster,” Damaso Aldana García, a member of the Indigenous Ch’orti’ Mayan Ancestral Authorities of Jocotán, tells me, while we stand in a withered milpa, the traditional fields of maize and beans that sustain small farmers.

“This is a total disaster.”

The sun beats down on us and over the fields of the Pinalito, which sits in the dry corridor that stretches between Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. We look over the lost harvest. The crops that were sown three months ago are turning brown, and plants that would have provided seed for next year, or maize for tortillas, have withered away.

In June 2018, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence traveled to Guatemala to meet with the Presidents of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. During the meeting, he reiterated the Trump Administration’s hostility to migration from the region.

“If you want to come to the United States, come legally, or don’t come at all,” Pence declared during his visit. “Don’t risk your lives or the lives of your children by coming to the United States on the road run by drug smugglers and human traffickers. Hold on to your homes and your homeland. Hold on to your children. Build your lives in your homes.”

But climate change is driving many people from the dry corridor of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador to make the enormous decision to leave their homes in the hopes of providing for their families. They see themselves as having no other choice.

Climate change is driving many people to leave their homes in the hopes of providing for their families. They see themselves as having no other choice.

Todd Miller, a journalist and author of the book Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security, suggests in his book that the effects of climate change means small farmers either see too much water or not enough. He points to super storms that inundate villages in countries like the Philippines, or severe droughts that further push farmers to extreme levels of poverty. Both displace people from their communities, Miller writes.

The dry corridor in southern Guatemala is one of the places where climate change has meant that the rains farmers rely on for supporting their families never arrive. The pressures of poverty worsened by a changing climate can push people to seek other means of supporting their families.

“It is necessity that obliges us to go,” says Cruz Ramirez Garcia, a forty-two-year-old farmer from Pinalito. “If families had the means of supporting their families, they would not leave their homes.”

International organizations have expressed concern over the impact of drought on small farmers. Oxfam International estimates that farmers have lost between 80 and 100 percent of their bean and corn harvests in past years due to the drought.

The Ch’orti’ Mayan communities of southern Guatemala have traditionally migrated to neighboring Honduras to work during the coffee harvests as a means of economic survival during dry periods. Migrant laborers received less pay for their work than they would receive working on a plantation in Guatemala, but found much improved working conditions in Honduras, including provided food and lodging during harvests.

But the drought that has devastated the region since since 2012 is making this option less viable.

“Normally at this time, families are waiting to harvest their crops, but the drought has affected everything,” says Aldana Garcia, a community authority and a worker who has participated in this yearly migration. “Right now, the migratory situation is going to be more difficult because normally there is no other place to go get resources to sustain the family.”

× Expand Jeff Abbott A shriveled ear of corn in a “milpa,” a traditional corn field in Guatemala’s countryside. Climate change is driving many people from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador to leave their homes in the hopes of providing for their families.

Ramirez Garcia agrees. “We are dedicated to agriculture, like our ancestors,” he said. “But we are very affected by this drought. Not just this year, but in the last several.”

The farmer first attempted to cross into the United States in 2017 as a result of losses due to previous droughts. He was captured on the border and deported back to Guatemala. In February 2018, he tried again, and was captured in Texas. He was held for four months in an ICE facility before being deported back to Guatemala in July 2018. He described his experience of incarceration as akin to “torture.”

Yet despite those experiences, Ramirez Garcia is still considering another attempt to make the journey to the United States to find work.

“Who knows when the rains will come; only God knows if they will come or if this drought will continue,” he says.

The international community has pledged support for farmers facing the drought. In past years, the European Union has provided money to 3,000 families in Zacapa and El Progreso. Yet all too often these funds fail to reach those most affected, especially those in Chiquimula.

“When the international aid comes from other countries to help resolve the crisis,” explains Aldana García, “it stays in the hands of the government, the municipalities, and within the Ministry of the Interior. The aid never comes to the people suffering. The indigenous communities remain totally abandoned.”