A narrow road, bitten by the sea, leads to El Bosque. The vestiges of a series of buildings invite us to imagine what that town was like before the rise in water levels in 2019.
The flood is also marked by trees, now immersed in the waves that have witnessed how community members had to leave their homes and now return every day to fish.
Guadalupe Cobos says that her life is deeply linked to this place, where she sells fish to visitors to the redesigned beaches. El Bosque, in Tabasco, is the first community recognized by the authorities as being displaced by climate change in the country.
He didn't imagine that he would have to lead a collective petition for the State to grant them a new place to live. Relocated 10 kilometers from the sea in El Nuevo Bosque, Guadalupe's days are now filled with transfers on a winding road surrounded by tropical vegetation. Her husband, Antonio Mayoral, walks through it practically in the dark, as his fishing work starts before the sun comes up.
Guadalupe is moving to a new life after the community's displacement. Photographs: Ricardo Miranda.
From their new home in a subdivision of Frontera, the capital of Centla, they now look to the future. While their homes are now safe from the sea, the fishing didn't leave the community. Of the 51 houses in the new town, only one has abandoned the activity that supports them.
Guadalupe and her husband share their desire for regular fishing. Form a cooperative with the inhabitants of El Nuevo Bosque and, why not, a fishing refuge.
Today there are no permit holders, security protocols or support of any kind in El Bosque. They are free fishermen. They are on the sidelines of government support. In practical terms, they lack aid with equipment or gasoline and are not registered in support standards such as BienPesca, an annual transfer of 7,500 pesos. An atmosphere that they dream of transforming.
“We are organized. Yes, but what do I legally mean to have something like that before Pesca (in reference to Conapesca)? Because we don't have the truth. We are free fishermen. We don't have a cooperative, we don't have a ready-made shelter. Then it would be very different between one thing and another,” he says.
The concern about the voracity of the sea did not stop the day they left. Guadalupe affirms that to regularize is also to demand that dredges and breakwaters be built to stop its progress.
Fishermen from El Bosque come to the beach at two in the morning to unload and weigh the day's catch. So they travel at night from El Nuevo Bosque, a route stalked by crime, whose risk they try to allay with group transfers.
However, it's as if the “old” Forest had been forgotten by the authorities once people moved in. The road cracks, tourists' garbage piles up on the beach, and intermittent water and electricity services put fishermen in jeopardy.
Once again, they are alone in the face of the challenges of daily life.
“I mean, it's hard for everyone to work there. In fact, yesterday the power went out early. Last night they put it already in the afternoon. Last night, with the whirl that had been going on, it went off again. And right now they went to compose it, there's light again. But they have already gone twice from yesterday (June 12) to today,” Mayoral laments.
Now without permanent residents, El Bosque has been left like a fishing town, where vestiges stand out from the sea. Photographs: Ricardo Miranda.
Climate Change
At the end of February last year, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) held its first hearing on climate migration, where several cases were heard in Latin America about displacement caused by global warming, mainly due to industrial activity and the burning of fossil fuels. The Bosque case resounded in that room in Washington.
“Climate change does not wait for political times, on the contrary, it is progressing mercilessly. With these last shocks came chaos, children without homes, without schools, walls falling and the hopelessness of having nowhere to go. A community that a few years before exported tons of fish, whose houses have a solid floor and a future now survived on sheet roofs,” said Guadalupe Mayoral, another representative of the community.
On July 4, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (Inter-American Court of Human Rights) declared that States have legal obligations to protect communities from climate change.
This is the first time that a human rights court has defined this type of obligation, following a request for an advisory opinion made by Colombia and Chile. This opens the door to the right to a healthy climate in the American continent.
The legal framework in Mexico is still lagging behind in dealing with these catastrophes, says Cobos, who recalls the legal vacuum he dealt with to authorize a relocation of El Bosque.
“Hopefully what doesn't happen to us to future communities and that when they go through a process like El Bosque there will already be a law. There's already something so they don't fight as hard as we do. That suddenly we would arrive in the municipality and they would say, 'it's not my place, but the state (of Tabasco) '. 'No, it's just that there isn't any instance here that corresponds to it'. In other words, there was no one to be responsible,” says the leader.
Mexico, a country with 11,000 kilometers of coastline, is vulnerable to rising sea levels and natural phenomena triggered by climate change.
Guadalupe and her husband learned that the town was flooded in 2007, when Tabasco was hit by an atmospheric interaction between cold fronts and Tropical Storm Noel.
A row of trees that protected the houses in El Bosque de los Nortes was removed by wind and water. They experienced it as a realization that houses would be the next to suffer from the climate, says Mayoral. And the time came in 2019, when the entry of the sea became imminent due to coastal erosion.
Trees are references for the water level community, a consequence of climate change. Photographs: Ricardo Miranda and Juan García.
A New Home
The heat settles on the concrete. The homes of El Nuevo Bosque greet visitors with flowers in small portions of the garden. The identical streets of the subdivision offer an air of tranquility.
One of the achievements that makes them happy is the school that has a teacher. It serves a group of multigrade children in a trailer because it is a mobile school.
“We asked for that classroom when the sea was already in full swing. And we said, well, such a classroom suits us because since it's mobile, you hit it with a trailer and you already pull it. But they didn't want to give them to us, they just gave them to us. It'll be about 4 months old. So these are things that suddenly changed our children's lives too,” Guadalupe says.
The New Forest is comprised of rows of identical houses. Families celebrate having a school. Photographs: Ricardo Miranda.
Readaptation for adults is more difficult. Guadalupe's home has what it takes, but a yearning for the sea comes and goes like the waves that have accompanied their lives.
“And I can't have the freedom I wanted here because my freedom at sea was different. That is, without obstacles, without anyone prohibiting you. I'm not saying that here in Frontera there is anyone who forbids you to go out, but you don't have that sea,” he says.
A pasture landscape with some cows surrounds the subdivision. From the windows of some houses in El Nuevo Bosque, curious neighbors look out onto the street, others spend hours with plastic tables outside their homes to get rid of the heat of confinement.
“But with everything and that, right? We have to learn to live differently. Because what happened to us, this climate change thing, changes your life. Someone invented climate change. And the word fell a little short of what it is, but it's something very big, something that I wouldn't wish to anyone. I wouldn't want anything to happen to anyone else than to the Forest.”
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