A reality compounding vulnerability
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The Central American Dry Corridor Humanitarian Crisis presents a strong vulnerability for Guatemalans, especially for indigenous Guatemalans who are more likely to live in rural communities and rely on farming for their source of income and food. The Dry Corridor refers to a swath of tropical dry forest stretching from southern Mexico to Panama that has suffered from severe climate change-induced droughts and climate shocks such as El Niño.
The crisis is a cause of malnutrition, food insecurity, economic insecurity, and displacement in the region. The most affected populations and hardest-hit countries in the Dry Corridor are El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. The drought has led to intense food insecurity of millions of people. In 2018, over 280,000 hectares of bean and maize crop in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua were lost leading to 2 million people being food insecure.
In Guatemala specifically, the Dry Corridor spreads across 38% of the country. In recent years, the crisis has worsened with increasingly wild weather patterns that have hurt rural farming communities that depend on crops for food and money. 2019 was the fifth straight year of drought and that year, the UN announced that farmers in the region lost between 50-75% of their crop due to high temperatures, drought, and irregular weather.
Despite the severity of the crisis, it has received little attention from the global media and foreign audiences. Director of the World Food Program (WFP) for Latin America and the Caribbean, Miguel Barreto claims that "the phenomenon of drought in the Dry Corridor is practically invisible at the media level, it is not known and does not receive the attention that monopolizes the crisis of migrants in Venezuela or of migrant travelers."
The crisis influences individual’s access to food, increases the risk of malnutrition, and drives people and communities to engage in extreme coping strategies. Given the COVID-19 pandemic, realities in the region are likely to worsen. In Guatemala especially, indigenous communities are more likely to live in rural areas (and in the regions most affected by drought) and suffer from poverty. Therefore, it is vital to understand how this crisis may influence indigenous lived experiences in the region and inform media policy that takes this into consideration.
Specifically, there is a need for media organizations to tell and amplify the stories of communities and individuals suffering from the Dry Corridor Crisis and understand how the crisis interplays with other legacies of trauma, poverty, pervasive regional violence and vulnerabilities for Guatemala's marginalized indigenous population.
