Tropic of Chaos (26 page)

As Donald R. Nelson and Timothy J. Finan, two experts on the matter, have found, government actions now provide food, water, and cash to victims of drought. The Northeast has been targeted for both emergency drought aid and big water-storage infrastructure projects for more than one hundred years. “As a consequence, drought-related mortality is no longer apparent and forced migrations have significantly declined, suggesting that the state has been successful in mitigating the worst of the impacts. Nonetheless, as a result of the high levels of vulnerability, farm families remain dependent on the state political apparatus (and the local elite) during times of crisis.”
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Just as MST and CV represent two contradictory grassroots adaptive responses to suffering, Lula's tropical New Deal and the paramilitary assaults of the BOPE upon the favelas are examples of the Brazilian state's conflicting potentials. The social problems of poverty and violence in Brazil will become more intense as climate change takes hold. Some amount of repression is inevitable. The question is, Which tendency within the state will dominate future policy: the move to alleviate suffering or that to violently contain and repress it?

A new day has begun and it looks like night.

 

 

 

T
HE WIND OFF the Mexican desert was cold and gritty. A pale winter sun slipped away, and the shadows of Juarez reached long across the streets. I was riding with a Mexican army patrol in a military truck that bounced and lurched across the broken terrain. Cinderblock shacks sat scattered haphazardly over the steep little hills and gullies. We were driving around and around waiting for violence. That is what the soldiers do here: drive in loops, then stop for snacks, then drive some more. Soon a bullet-ridden corpse would turn up. Several do every night, because this is one of the most violent cities in the world.

A gum-chewing soldier in the back of the truck, holding his G3 rifle in a gloved hand and the truck roll bar with the other, had a plan for Juarez: “martial law.” He scanned the flat rooftops through pale yellow wraparound shooting glasses. “A curfew. House-to-house searches. Take all the weapons. No mercy.”

They say there is a war in Mexico, and the body count makes it look that way. Close to thirty thousand people have been killed here since 2006, when President Felipe Calderón deployed the military into the border
cities to fight the drug war.
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By 2009, more than eleven hundred of the dead were soldiers, police, and security officials. A classified Mexican government report described 2009 as the deadliest year to date with over ninety-six hundred killed; the next year was even worse.
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At the end of 2009, when I spent some time drifting around the border region, Juarez—shabby, grime smeared, semiabandoned—clocked a staggering twenty-six hundred killings.
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Many of these incidents also involved kidnapping, torture, and mutilation. El Paso, on the other hand, counted only four murders. Some Juarez murders happened one at a time, some in massacres of up to eighteen victims at once.
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Some happened in the dead of night, others during noontime traffic jams. New Year's Day 2010 began with a mass killing: more than a dozen gunmen attacked a house party of middle-class high school students, killing thirteen and wounding two dozen.
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Then two US embassy officials were ambushed and murdered. By late April 2010, twenty-nine police officers had already been killed in Juarez; then gunmen ambushed two police vehicles in the middle of town, killing seven more cops. Around the same time, gunmen raided the customs office on the Mexican side of the international bridge linking Camargo, Mexico, to Rio Grande, Texas. The same day, in La Union, Guerrero, police were attacked with grenades. A police chief and two deputies were executed in the farm town of Los Aldamas, Nuevo Leon. The police chief of a nearby town was decapitated. Then, around the same time, gunmen ambushed and killed the assistant police chief of Nogales, Sonora, and his bodyguard. In the states of Tamaulipas and Nuevo Leon, dozens of narco gunmen launched simultaneous attacks on two army garrisons; eighteen of the attackers were reported killed. A car bomb went off in Juarez, and seventeen migrants were massacred in Tamaulipas about one hundred miles from Brownsville, Texas.
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These days, Mexican mayors, police officials, and drug-rehab patients are all routinely murdered in shockingly large numbers. The list of strange atrocities could go on and on.

At first glance, this crisis of violence seems to have little to do with climate change—drug dealers do not murder cops because the Intertropical
Convergence Zone is off kilter. But, on closer examination, the meltdown of northern Mexico provides another illustration of the catastrophic convergence: policies that create poverty and violence are now colliding with the new realities of climate change, and together these three forces are creating socially destructive forms of adaptation.

As I explored Juarez, it became clear that climate change is already an important factor in the crisis. First and foremost, climate change is undermining agriculture and fishing. Along with neoliberal economic policies, it is driving rising unemployment and pushing people north, toward the United States, and into the traps of the underground drug economy.

Mexico is being hammered by climate change. The northern half of the country is in the grips of the worst drought in sixty years, while the southeastern areas are being deluged. A recent study found that for every 10 percent decrease in crop yields, 2 percent more Mexicans will leave for the United States. The same study projects that 10 percent of the current population of Mexicans aged fifteen to sixty-five could attempt to emigrate north as a result of rising temperatures.
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The year 2010 saw more freakish weather: rains destroyed much of the bean harvest in the Pacific Coast states of Nayarit and Sinaloa; rivers burst their banks and flooded crops in Michoacán. Hurricane Alex soaked northeastern Mexico, killing at least thirty people and destroying crops. Mass flooding hit Tabasco for the second time in four years; in 2007, floodwaters inundated 80 percent of that state.
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In 1990 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted that “the gravest effects of climate change may be those on human migration.” Increased storms, droughts, flooding, proliferation of pathogens, and rising seas will wreak havoc upon the world's urbanized coastlines and agricultural economies. This suggests a future in which millions of people will be on the move. A one-meter rise in sea level—almost certain by the century's end, barring some strange intervention by Mother Nature, like a radical solar minimum—will inundate terrain currently housing about 10 percent
of the world's population. Many other people living far from the sea, on semiarid agricultural lands, will be unable to adapt and forced to move.

In this light, the US-Mexico border becomes a template for understanding dangerous global dynamics. All over the world, borders and policing regimes are hardening as restrictive immigration policies are matched by a xenophobic style of politics.

By 2050 global population is expected to peak at 9 billion, and global temperatures are likely be close to 2°C hotter than today, or more. How many environmental refugees will there be? A report from the International Migration Organization was realistic about the uncertainties, noting, “Current estimates range between 25 million and 1 billion people by 2050.” The report also explained that “as is already the case with political refugees, it is likely that the burden of providing for climate migrants will be borne by the poorest countries—those least responsible for emissions of greenhouse gases.”
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Britain's 2006 Stern Review estimated that between 200 and 250 million people would be uprooted by climate change. That is 10 times the current number of refugees in the world.
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Let that sink in for a moment. Bangladeshi academic Atiq Rahman had it correct when he warned, “Millions of people will be moving. No amount of nuclear submarines will be able to stop that.”
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Another report estimated there are 214 million international migrants in the world today. “If this number continues to grow at the same pace as during the last 20 years, international migrants could number 405 million by 2050.”
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Migration unfolds in a series of knock-on effects that mask causal relationships. In poor countries, it is not necessarily the poorest and hardest hit who migrate the first and furthest. “The ability to migrate is a function of mobility and resources (both financial and social). In other words, the people most vulnerable to climate change are not necessarily the ones most likely to migrate.”
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Here the catastrophic convergence reveals itself again: the climate crisis adds its propellant power to the already unfolding, highly destructive legacy of neoliberalism and Cold War military adventures. Climate change acts as an additional causal factor in shaping already-established migration
flows. And in the face of rising migration, the borders between wealthy core economies and the developing world harden and militarize.
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On the south bank of the Rio Grande I met José Ramírez. Squat and ruddy faced, dressed in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, he was unemployed and gazing across the river at the United States. He had been a fisherman in Michoacán but was displaced by the economic aftershocks of 1997–1998's El Niño. His story reveals the connections between environmental and economic crises.

“The sea became red, and all the fish just disappeared,” Ramírez said in explaining why he left his home. The coast of Michoacán was becoming warmer, both the land and the sea. At first he hung on, but El Niño had put him into debt. Ramírez's family had run a little restaurant but had to close it when everyone took an economic hit. Eventually, he had to sell his skiff and outboard motor. Then he worked on a large shrimp fishing boat, but the income was minimal. So a couple years after the weather shock of El Niño, he moved north to Juarez, aiming to come to the United States, which he did. For about a year he worked illegally as a roofer in Las Cruces, New Mexico, but then he was caught and deported.

Now he is waiting to go back. “I even talked to my old boss on the phone. He said he has work for me,” Ramírez said, looking across the dry Rio Grande into downtown El Paso. But it is difficult to cross the border these days. He needs money to hire a professional coyote. And there is no work here in Juarez. Between the global economic downturn and the city's extreme drug violence, industry is in decline. Ramírez makes just enough to survive from occasional day labor.

“The killings around here make it very hard. I saw a child killed right in front of me. Not far from here at a store, they shot a man and then the child. I don't want to get involved in drugs. I just want to do honest work,” Ramírez said.

What happened to José Ramírez? In simple terms, the El Niño pushed him into debt, which in turn forced him to migrate north. As I have repeated
throughout this book, it is impossible to say that a warmer globe has caused any single weather event. But the pattern of association is clear: increased surface temperatures correlate with more El Niño events.

Climate change unfolds as part of a matrix of causality. The warm water of the El Niño triggered the poisonous red tide algae bloom that killed and pushed away the fish and thus began Ramírez's sojourn in the north. But the toxic algae bloom was not produced by warm water alone. It was also created on land by rampant development of tourist hotels, golf courses, and agroexport fruit plantations, all of which discharge more sewage and organophosphates into the sea, feeding toxic algae blooms.

Compounding this increase in organic pollution is the decline of natural defenses in the form of mangrove forests and wetlands. Mangrove forests grow on tidal flats and clean freshwater runoff by absorbing the nutrients that otherwise feed algae blooms. Their decline means more algae. The same uncontrolled development that adds organic pollutants to coastal waters also clears away mangroves. According to the United Nations' Food and Agricultural Organization, Mexico had 1.4 million hectares of mangrove forest in 1971. By 1999, those coastal woodlands had dropped by almost half to only 733,000 hectares.
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Likewise, the social impacts of the red tide were not inevitable but were created in part by political economic policies. For example, why were the fish stocks not more robust? Because Mexico's fisheries are badly managed and in decline; catches have been level since 1980 despite ever more investment.
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Why was there no public system of support for José Ramírez during his difficult times? Because Mexico is now a social laboratory of radical free market orthodoxy.

The Mexican Revolution was broadly progressive in character. Among its many reforms, it reserved the best fish stocks for small individual fisherman and state-sponsored cooperatives. “Throughout the 1930s co-operatives were progressively awarded concessions to national fish stocks, a process that culminated with the 1947 Fishing Law granting them exclusive access
rights to the nine most important inshore marine and shellfish fisheries.”
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Subsistence or artisanal fishermen got the rest. How fish were caught, processed, and sold was, like much of the economy, encased in layers of regulation defined by economic nationalism. A parastatal enterprise called Productos Pesqueros Mexicanos, or Propemex, controlled fish packing and processing, price regulation and marketing.
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