Central America Faces Intense Wildfire Season
Wildfires driven by the effects of El Niño and climate change are raging across Central America. Thousands of fires have burned around 660,475 acres in Honduras; 43,497acres in El Salvador; 715,886 acres in Nicaragua; and 208,223 acres in Costa Rica, according to data from the Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS), which looked at the region from January 1 to April 9, 2024.
As Guatemalan President Bernardo Arévalo nears his first 100 days in office, the country has seen a wave of over 1,600 wildfires break out across the country. According to the data from GWIS, 522,459 acres have burned; however, the Guatemalan government’s National Coordination for Disaster Reduction (CONRED) has tracked only 47,860 acres as affected by wildfires. In the previous fire season between 2022 and 2023, CONRED registered 980 fires during the dry season. In the current season, there has been a worsening of fires due to the drier effects of El Niño and a political crisis.
Since the beginning of Guatemala’s dry season, fires have consumed vegetation across the country. Fires have consumed the banks of the picturesque Agua volcano in February, and firefighters are working to put out a fire in the landfill run by the Authority for the Sustainable Management of the Lake Amatitlán Basin (AMSA) just south of Guatemala City, which has created health concerns for the region.
As of April 19, there are fifty-five active wildfires across Guatemala.
The spread of fires is being strengthened by the effects caused by El Niño, and climate change is exacerbating these effects.
“When there is the El Niño phenomenon in this part of the world. . . . we have high temperatures, low humidity, and many days without rain,” Raúl Maas, the lead of the Institute for Research and Projection on Natural Environment and Society at the Rafael Landivar University, tells The Progressive. “The conditions that favor the burning of materials to prepare the soils for the next productive cycle increase, right? To the extent that the planet has been warming— that is, global warming—it has made the El Niño phenomena increasingly more recurrent and more intense.”
Arévalo has requested international assistance to combat the fires. He has also suggested that these fires were intentionally set.
“The current situation is not a coincidence, 80 percent of those fires were set,” Arévalo said in the press conference announcing he was requesting the implementation of a State of Emergency in order to combat the fires.
However, Guatemala’s congress blocked the approval of the declaration, which would have allowed the various agencies combating the forest to more easily make purchases and receive international aid. The president has criticized the decision to not approve the declaration.
And in a sense, the fires across the country were set by someone: farmers who lost control of the fires.
The increase in fires registered in the region correlates with the burning of fields by farmers in preparation of the coming rains, as the dry warm temperatures mean the fire will burn easily. Burning fields is part of the ancestral tradition in Mesoamerica, according to Maas.
Raúl Maas suggests that the political aspect of the fires is meant to make the new administration look like it is incapable of addressing the massive crisis.
“The problem is that the way in which the burning is done is not regulated enough, there is a lot of neglect,” Maas explains. “When materials are burned to enable land for production, that causes agricultural burning to get out of control and begin to affect surrounding areas, often forested areas.”
But in spite of this, Maas suggests there is reason to believe that there are fires being purposely set.
“In this country there is almost always someone who is striking a match,” Maas says. “But it is not far from the fact that there are some who already do it with a premeditated act with some more objectives that are linked to political purposes.”
Maas suggests that the political aspect of the fires is meant to make the new administration look like it is incapable of addressing the massive crisis. And Guatemalan institutions that respond to natural disasters have been among those most affected by corruption. This has affected their ability to respond to the fires.
“The institutional disaster of [corruption in] the country also affected the capacity to respond to this type of event,” Maas says. “The capacity to respond in terms of resources, human, physical resources, or financial economic resources is very limited.”
As a result of the erosion of Guatemala’s ability to respond to natural disasters, the first responders who arrive to fight the fires are residents and community authorities. They often have little to no training and knowledge to fight back the fires, but they are the first ones to protect their territories.
When a fire broke out on the banks of the extinct Siete Orejas volcano, which looms over the town of Concepción Chiquirichapa in the department of Quetzaltenango, Mayor Pedro Sánchez Cortéz called on residents to head up the mountain to fight the fire.
“We in Concepción Chiquirichapa have never had a situation like this,” Sulama Lorenzo, a twenty-nine-year-old resident of the village of Telená in Concepción Chiquirichapa, tells The Progressive.
“The alarm was activated on February 24,” she explains. “On Sunday, everyone started climbing to the top of the mountain from the center of Concepción and from the villages [to fight the fire].”
Concepción Chiquirichapa is a small Indigenous Mayan Mam town in Guatemala’s western highlands, with nearly 20,000 residents in the municipal seat and the surrounding seventeen villages. The town largely relies on agriculture, being the origin of much of the potato production in Guatemala. Like many other communities in the area, many residents have migrated to the United States to find opportunities.
Their efforts were supported by remittances sent back from migrants in the United States, which went to renting two helicopters to bring water and paying for the fuel needed to fight the fire. Within a week, the fire was under control due to the rapid response by residents.
Lorenzo and her family were able to contribute to purchasing food, water, and Gatorades for those who were fighting the fire. They were able to make these contributions thanks to the money sent from her sister and cousin who migrated to the United States.
“If it wasn’t for [money sent by migrants], I do not know how we would have gotten out of this crisis,” Lorenzo explains.
Money sent home from the United States has helped communities weather crises like those caused by the wildfires. Other communities, such as San Martin Chile Verde, which sits just down the mountain from Concepción Chiquirichapa, also fought fires with the assistance of remittances.
Money sent home from the United States has helped communities weather crises like those caused by the wildfires.
The amount of money sent home as remittances has steadily increased in the last decade. In 2023, migrants living abroad sent home $19.8 billion. So far in 2024, migrants have sent home $4.68 billion as of March, according to the Guatemalan Central Bank. The money going into communal responses to the crisis is a form of solidarity in Indigenous communities across Guatemala.
“When there are collective actions to preserve their natural environment, obviously they do it in very precarious conditions,” Maas says of fire-fighting community members. “When the fires are very large that occur in territories where there is a community organization that has links with migrants, there is a contribution from the migrants to contribute to putting out the fire.”
He adds, “There are mechanisms to mobilize resources that come from the United States to safeguard communities.”
But this is still an example of the abandonment of Indigenous communities by the Guatemalan State.
“The risk management in which Guatemalan society lives is very poor and is further degraded by the limited capacity available to address it,” Maas concludes. “And not only in the addressing of risk, but also in prevention, because there are no resources.”