Hurricane Eta devastates Central America, indigenous communities among hardest hit
by Sandra Cuffe
November 17,2020
| Source:
The Intercept
On the northern coast of Honduras, Anabel Nuñez and other leaders from the Afro-Indigenous Garifuna community of Triunfo de la Cruz inspected the damages wrought by Hurricane Eta. Four homes on the collective land title were completely destroyed by the Gamma River, which was created by a tropical storm 15 years ago when a river affected by oil palm plantations overflowed and branched off, running through Triunfo de la Cruz on its way to the Caribbean. Storm surge affected the coast, and uprooted coconut palms now lie along the shoreline. Residents had planted the trees to mitigate increasing coastal erosion, and they had recently started to bear fruit. Nuñez estimates the community lost up to half its traditional dugout canoes used for fishing, and many residents lost subsistence yucca, malanga, plantain, and other crops.
“The crops and little shelters people used when they worked the land were washed away,” Nuñez told The Intercept in a telephone interview. “They are just gone without a trace.”
Hurricane Eta devastated Indigenous communities in Central America this month as the U.S. formally withdrew from the world’s foremost climate accord. While international attention remained focused on the U.S. elections, Hurricane Eta made landfall in northeastern Nicaragua and then proceeded to make its way across Honduras, with severe impacts on Guatemala and other countries in the region as it headed back out to sea and regained hurricane strength before hitting the Florida coast.
With another hurricane, Iota, now bearing down on Central America, Triunfo de la Cruz will use its schools as shelters and is ramping up efforts at the donation distribution center it set up to manage the economic impacts of the coronavirus pandemic. When Nuñez spoke with The Intercept, the community had not received any aid from the municipal government, but food supplies were coming in.
“They are from people with relatives here,” Nuñez said. “They are Garifuna sisters and brothers who live outside the country.”
There are Garifuna communities in Guatemala, Belize, and Nicaragua, but after Honduras, the largest Garifuna population resides in New York City. The Garifuna diaspora in the U.S. maintains close ties with coastal communities in Central America, and cross-border mutual aid networks offer support in the face of disaster. Garifuna have been heading north and sometimes back for decades.
Migration often spikes in the wake of crises, and the only comparable precedent for Eta’s destruction is Hurricane Mitch, which devastated northern Central America in 1998. Within a few months of Mitch’s landfall, U.S. and Mexican authorities reported record numbers of apprehensions of Hondurans fleeing the disaster. The fallout from Eta and Iota may create similar conditions.
As often happens, the populations that least contribute to climate change are bearing the brunt of its impacts. For many, it is disaster upon disaster. Indigenous territories were already under siege from violence, extractive industry and energy projects, tourism development, cattle ranching, and monoculture export crop plantations.
As Eta slowly made its way north, days of rain caused widespread flooding: washing out highways and bridges, submerging entire towns, and generating mass displacement. Millions of people have been affected. There are more than 145 confirmed deaths across Central America so far, but the toll will likely continue to rise. Many of the people missing are buried under landslides.
Hurricane Eta made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane before being downgraded to a tropical depression as it advanced overland. For many, it is reminiscent of Hurricane Mitch, which left at least 11,000 people dead and thousands missing. Eta’s death toll does not come close to that, but as with Mitch, Honduras was the hardest hit, and recovery will likely be measured in years or even decades.
Hurricane Mitch was considered a rare event, but that is no longer the case with Eta and Iota. This year’s Atlantic hurricane season has been so extreme that the naming of tropical storms ran through the alphabet well before Eta came along. Iota became a Category 5 hurricane on Monday and is expected to bring dangerous levels of rainfall to the countries hardest hit by Eta. “This rain would lead to significant, life-threatening flash flooding and river flooding, along with mudslides in areas of higher terrain,” according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center.
In the face of increasingly frequent extreme weather events and rising sea levels, countries worked together to determine global measures to address and slow down climate change. The U.S. was a signatory to the resulting accord, the Paris Agreement, which entered into force in 2016 under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
In June 2017, President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. would withdraw from the accord, but because the accord prevented signatories from giving notice of withdrawal for three years following ratification, the U.S. withdrawal officially occurred right when Eta was bearing down on Central America.
Eta made landfall in Nicaragua’s North Caribbean Coast Autonomous Region, first hitting the predominantly Indigenous Miskito coast before moving inland over more remote Indigenous Mayangna communities. The Mayangna won a groundbreaking collective land rights case in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in 2001, but cattle ranching — linked to Nicaraguan beef exports to the U.S. — has been expanding for years into their territory and a biosphere reserve.
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Theme(s): Communities and Organisations.
