3258. ‘Food Doesn’t Grow Here Anymore. That’s Why I Would Send My Son North.’

By Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times, June 5, 2019

Ana Jorge Jorge holding a nephew. She sees no future for her only surviving son in their Guatemalan village. photo: Daniele Volpe for The New York Times.

NENTÓN, Guatemala — To understand why President Trump’s new sanctions and other flailing to end Central American immigration aren’t working, step into the dark, melancholy hovel of Ana Jorge Jorge.

She lives in Guatemala’s western highlands in the hillside village of Canquintic, near the town of Nentón, and she’s a widow because of the American dream.

Her husband, Mateo Gómez Tadeo, borrowed thousands of dollars and migrated north to the United States several years ago after his crops here failed. He found work in Alabama cutting flowers but then caught an infection and died, leaving hungry children back home and a huge debt hanging over the family.

Two of their sons, aged 7 and 14, soon died as well, apparently of malnutrition-related illnesses. Jorge Jorge pulled another son, Juan, out of school in the second grade so that he could work in the fields and help pay off the debt. If it isn’t paid, lenders will seize the family land.

“We all suffer now,” Jorge Jorge told me grimly. “I have to struggle daily.”

If any family understands the risks of traveling to the United States, it’s this one. Yet Juan, now 11, is talking about trying to make his own way north. And Jorge Jorge, while terrified at the prospect of losing him, approves.

“I say, ‘Go,’” she said bleakly. “‘There’s nothing here, so go.’”

I’m on my annual win-a-trip journey, in which I take a university student on a reporting trip, and we’ve come to Guatemala to report on migration. My student winner, Mia Armstrong of Arizona State University, and I have heard from innumerable Guatemalans that the most fundamental driver of emigration is desperation — and, to an extent that most Americans don’t appreciate, this desperation often reflects drought and severe weather linked to climate change.

“Food doesn’t grow here anymore,” Jorge Jorge said. “That’s why I would send my son north.”
There are other factors as well, and the despair also reflects a marginalization of Mayan communities that goes back hundreds of years, presided over in the capital by an incompetent kleptocracy. But climate change is aggravating the desperation.

“The weather has changed, clearly,” said Flori Micaela Jorge Santizo, a 19-year-old woman whose husband has abandoned the fields to find work in Mexico. She noted that drought and unprecedented winds have destroyed successive corn crops, leaving the family destitute, adding, “And because I had no money, my children died.”

Both her children, Isamara and Vidalia, died as infants in the last couple of years, Vidalia just six months ago.

So the paradox is that American carbon emissions are partly responsible for wretchedness in Guatemala that drives emigration, yet when those desperate Guatemalans arrive at the U.S. border they are treated as invaders.

Yes, of course: It’s time to note the standard caveat that it’s impossible to link any particular drought or hurricane to long-term climate change. But that feels like a hollow excuse when you’re facing a young mom who has lost both of her children because of impoverishment from drought.

“The great majority of these kids will migrate,” Luis Armando Jiménez, principal of a rural middle school, told me as he pointed to his students in the courtyard. “There is not enough rain, so their only option is to migrate.”
As they see their own crops wither, families watch luckier households build new homes or buy motorcycles because of money sent back by a relative working in the U.S. Some of these new homes have U.S. flags painted on them.

Guatemalans understand the peril — in Jorge Jorge’s village, six people have died recently while traveling to the U.S. But the risk is preferable to remaining in a desiccating land that seems without a future.

There’s some evidence that aid programs can help farmers adjust to climate change and reduce the desire to emigrate. But Trump is choosing the worst combination of responses: cutting those aid programs while denying climate change.

“My husband is in the U.S. because there is nothing here,” Rosa Mendoza Raymundo, 35, of the village of Tierra Blanca told me. “It’s a sadness that our community has no water. That’s why people are leaving.”

She said her husband, Pascual, also took their daughter, Susanna, 17, because the trafficker offered a 30 percent discount if he brought a minor — to take advantage of the American practice of releasing a parent with a child. Now Pascual is cleaning houses in Kansas City, Mo., and Susanna is attending school there (she had dropped out in the third grade in the village).

Mendoza Raymundo pointed to her 4-year-old, Pedro, and offered with resignation, “If we make enough money, we’ll send him to the U.S. as well.”

Across some scorched corn and tomato fields, Julio Mateo Mateo, 42, explained why two of his sons had left for the United States: “They said, ‘There’s no rain. There’s nothing for us here.’” One son, Edvin, is now in Seattle, working 12 hours a day, seven days a week, and sending money home. The other son, Domingo, was caught in March and is expected to be deported.

A third son, now 14, will be the next to try his luck. Remaining as crops fail and children suffer is not an option.
“There’s no rain, and no way to grow crops,” Mateo Mateo said. “One can’t live here.”

1745. Boston's Winter from Hell

By E. J. Graff, The New York Times, February 20, 2015

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — BY now you’ve seen the starkly beautiful shots of Boston buried under snow: the panoramic city under a white blanket; snowbanks so high they crest over parked cars; piercing icicles glinting for two full stories from gutters dammed with ice; coat-muffled people dwarfed by snow-walled corridors that once were sidewalks.

You may have seen the funny images as well: the man snowboarding down an all-but-empty major boulevard, pulled by his friend’s snowmobile; drunk men diving out of second-floor windows into six-foot snowbanks; windows that merely frame a wall of snow.

But for those of us living here, it’s not a pretty picture. We are being devastated by a slow-motion natural disaster of historic proportions. The disaster is eerily quiet. There are no floating bodies or vistas of destroyed homes. But there’s no denying that this is a catastrophe.

In just three weeks, between Jan. 27 and Feb. 15, we have had four epic blizzards — seven feet of precipitation over three weeks — which crushed roofs, burst gutters, destroyed roads and sidewalks, closed schools and businesses, shut down highways, crippled public transit and trapped people in their homes. The infamous Blizzard of 1978 brought around 27 inches of snow and shut down the region for a week. In less than a month, we’ve seen more than three times as much snow. The temperature has hovered between 5 and 25 degrees, so the snow and ice haven’t melted.

Decades of underinvestment and alleged mismanagement of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, known as the T, have meant that the nation’s oldest subway system has been partly or entirely halted for nearly a month. (The head of the agency abruptly resigned last week amid criticism.)

On Twitter, a satirical map of the transit system has circulated, with entire subway and bus lines scribbled out with a black line, marked with “LOL,” and “Don’t even.” Across the region, mile-long lines of people stand for an hour or more, freezing in bitter winds, waiting for shuttle buses that are supposed to replace the trains and trolleys. Some have given up and walked home.

For workers paid by the hour, the impossibility of getting to work means disaster, especially since high housing prices have pushed poor people out of the city to outlying communities like Brockton, Lawrence and beyond. When I commiserated with a checkout clerk at my grocery store yesterday — he’s been missing work when the buses break down or just don’t come — thinly veiled panic showed in his eyes. “People will be losing their houses,” he said.

Even if you have a car, you can’t rely on it. Not everyone is spending the hours needed to dig it out, over and over again. Driving is a game of blind chicken, because the intersections are blocked by 12-foot mounds of plowed snow.

All roads are narrowed by plowed snow walls and snowed-under cars and deep slush that just can’t get cleared fast enough. And once a car turns into a putatively two-way street that’s now just one lane, who’s going to back up into traffic to let the other through? Once you arrive, where do you park?

Think about how annoying it is when one or two of your usual routes is temporarily shut down. That’s happened to every street here — with no end in sight. Car insurance companies are swamped with accident calls. Walking is treacherous: The Massachusetts Avenue Bridge over the Charles River, a major pedestrian artery that links Boston and Cambridge, is still inches deep with snow, but you can’t reach the railings because they are lined with snowbanks plowed in from earlier blizzards.

Working parents are desperate: When classes were canceled, they had to stay home, leave their kids alone or scramble to find child care. Even when the schools are open, many parents can’t work a full day: You drop off the child, spend two hours driving to work and have to leave early to get the child before after-school programs close.

But everybody is desperate. We’re all having to spend time and money we don’t have on plowing, car and house repairs, and heating because of the record-low temperatures. People who survive by holding down additional part-time jobs have had to skip those extra shifts.

Businesses have been hammered: Who’s going out to eat, shop or see a movie? How can businesses manufacture and deliver products or arrange deals if their workers just can’t show up? Some companies can let people work from home occasionally, but not every day for a month. Snow-removal services, roofers, chiropractors, and auto mechanics and body shops will profit — but that can’t possibly make up for what is drained from nearly every other business and household.

And it’s devastating for state and local governments. The City of Boston has spent $35 million on snow removal, more than twice what it had budgeted. That doesn’t include Cambridge or any of the surrounding towns, or the state. It doesn’t include how much it will cost to repair the devastated roads, sidewalks and bridges that will have been worn away by snow, freezing, salt and rust. Incoming tax revenues will fall because business and personal incomes are down. The state government expects to see a drop of $30 million in the next months.

Sure, it’s not the same as an earthquake: The snow will melt, eventually. But that will bring more woes. The flooding will hurt the T, ruin roofs and basements and clog roads still more.

Where are the federal disaster funds, the presidential visit, Anderson Cooper interviewing victims, volunteers flying in, goods and services donated after hurricanes and tornadoes? The pictures may be pretty. But we need help, now.

It’s snowing as I write this. We’re expecting more, along with freezing rain, this weekend. And the misery won’t end even when it all melts.

E. J. Graff is a senior fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University.