People displaced y climate emerge from Mexican town engulfed by sea

By Manuel Lopez

Centla, Mexico, Nov 7 (EFE).- The inhabitants of a town destroyed by marine erosion in the Gulf of Mexico have become climate displaced people who ask for their relocation because they fear being victims of the environmental crisis.

Inhabitants and climate environmentalists from Greenpeace warned Monday that, of a total of 90 families, 30 emigrated and 15 are at risk.

Since 2019, the rise in sea level has weakened the houses and “one by one they have fallen,” Yolanda Felix Montero, a resident of the area, told EFE.

Although the governor of Tabasco, Carlos Merino, promised to relocate them, this has not materialized.

The community of El Bosque, 13 kilometers north of the city of Frontera, on the coast at the mouth of the Grijalva River and the Gulf of Mexico, in 1950 was an irregular settlement of fishermen from Alvarado, Veracruz, and in 1982 obtained the official register of the municipal authorities.

Silvina Santana, 59, is a witness to how her community went from Eden to destruction for four decades, and said the relocation promised by the authorities will not come and has reproached Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador for abandoning him, originally from the condition.

“Lopez Obrador said that he took off his hat for his people and we are seeing that not because he abandoned us, look how we are!” she said.

Apolonia Cantu has her house on the mainland and fears that a sudden increase in the sea will destroy the community and her family.

“Already, in fact, it has taken half of the colony and the sea as far as it goes up, it stays there, it no longer goes down. Here, God forbid, a tidal wave is coming and it covers us all,” she told EFE.

Guadalupe Cobos arrived when she was 12 years old from Alvarado, Veracruz, and remembers that as a child she saw “the sea far away,” when it was not a threat.

Her family took root because it is a rich fishing area, but the outlook turned adverse due to contamination from oil platforms and the climate crisis.

“Here there is talk of a relocation and it is what we are waiting for and, if it does not happen, we have to see where. But it’s ugly when a community is destroyed, your friends leave, everyone leaves, your entire environment in which you are used to living. In other words, we don’t have that ‘Plan B,’ not really,” she said. EFE

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