Storms and droughts drive more people to US border

For the Indigenous Maya Ch’orti’ people of La Unión in eastern Guatemala, the daily struggle for water involves catching every drop of rain that drips from sloping metal roofs and walking long distances to fill plastic containers from overused streams.

In this parched region, communities rely on rainfall to feed their families and, in 2019, worked together to build water reservoirs high in the mountains in order to better cope with increasingly frequent droughts and unpredictable rains, which caused their maize and bean crops to fail.

But the following year brought the opposite problem. After years without enough rain, two powerful hurricanes, Eta and Iota, struck within a fortnight, causing flash floods and landslides that left dozens of people trapped in partially collapsed houses.