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While drought expands through Cunen as the spectre of El Niño climate instability approaches, one fear has seized this indigenous Guatemalan village — death from hunger.
The rains still haven’t come here, where local farmers fear the lack of water could ruin the subsistence crops on which they depend to survive.
“If there isn’t rain, (the crops) won’t come … If there isn’t anything, we’re going to die of hunger,” 38-year-old Cecilia Pasa Sarat, who has planted a small amount of corn, told AFP in Xetzac, a village in Cunen.
Cunen is a hard-to-reach mountainous region where the majority of the approximately 47,000 residents are poor and rely on water from wells that are now going dry.
