Climate Change in Gutemala

So here we are in the "developing world," in a country with far less means than the US...the other day, one of the two newspapers had a big spread about the impact of Climate Change. It discussed which regions in Guatemala  would become far more dry in the future. Here, the question of water and land accessibility already impacts who can eat enough and who is malnourished (52% of the country and in the region AFOPADI works, between 72 and 82% of the Indigenous are malnourished according to a recent AFOPADI study), so you can imagine the negative repercussions from less rain and all the impacts that follow.
Where AFOPADI works (and SSG supports), the dry season is normally from November through April. This past year, the dry season began in September...in Chicago, we had a severe drought so, who knows how we are all connected. Anyway, I have been visiting this area since 2005 and I have never encountered such intense heat here. People imagine that extra month of the dry season intensified the heat. By late morning, it´s been too hot to be out in the sun for more than a few minutes until the wind sweeps in mid-afternoon and it´s bearable. People plan their day around the heat, leaving for market early and returning so they avoid the mid-day sun. The rains normally begin in May and the Mayan ceremonies include this as part of their annual, seasonal rituals...I wish we had more integration with the land and the seasons and the weather in the US.
The area where AFOPADI works has such poor land that only the Indigenous migrant workers farm it because they have nowhere else to grow subsistance crops. Through AFOPADI permaculture practices (compost, terracing, avoiding monocultures and chemicals), yields are improved, but people still don´t own enough land to support the nutritional needs of their families. Around here, advocating for land reform can still get you killed. Just last week one leader from Platforma Agraria was kidnapped, tortured and assassinated. Another was kidnapped. This is all happening just as Guatemala is making History in terms of its past governmental and military use of Genocide. The former President during the early 1980s, Rios-Montt, is finally being brought to trail after eleven years of the cases being brought against him. He presided over the government during the worst years of the genocide against the Indigenous. There is much documentation of the atrocities during the 30-year-war that began after the CIA coup against the democratically-elected, Socialist President, Arbenz in 1954. Even though it is likely Rios-Montt will not be convicted, it´s amazing that the proceedings were broadcast over the Internet.
Yes, to more transparency!