In a school notebook with the leaves bent by humidity are the names written down with a pencil.
Ofelia, Alfredo, Beto, Eusebia, El Mocho, Alejandro, Celia, Pedro, Aurelia, Antonio Mayoral, Bertha, Miguel Cobos, teacher Yadira, Antonia Cardoza, Vicente, Margaro Cardoza, Estanislada Cardoza, Miguel Palacio, Maximina, Ana Bárbara, Pocho , Pedro El Loco, Tila, Viviana.
“I mentally wrote them one day of sadness to see how much we had already lost,” says Guadalupe Cobos, tall and strong, attached to the stove with which she feeds the visitors, “the notebook was no longer enough for me, but that is houses, houses, they are gone, they are gone, it is over, they no longer exist”.
Nobody fights against the sea and the sea swallowed them.
08:00
The town in Mexico flooded by climate change |
THE COUNTRY
Barbara Cardosa walks next to the houses destroyed by the sea. Photo: Gladys Serrano
El Bosque is one of the first towns in Mexico to suffer the unstoppable ravages of climate change.
Its inhabitants had only heard about it on TV and now they face the increasing intensity of rains and hurricanes, which hit harder and harder, the rise in temperatures and the ultimate damage: the rise in sea level.
No one keeps an exact account of the meters that the water has stolen, they estimate between 200 and 500. The situation has worsened so much since 2019 that neither the neighbors, nor the Government, nor the experts believe that it can be reversed.
They don't want to, but they accept that relocation is the only way out.
“It is a forced displacement”, sums up Juan Manuel Orozco, from Conexiones Climáticas, “that will continue to be repeated in other parts of the country, because as the women of El Bosque say:
This is a small fishing community, about a hundred people now, on the coast of Tabasco.
Located at the mouth of the Grijalva River, it is like a thumb sticking out of the ground and into the Gulf of Mexico to end up surrounded by water on all sides.
It is accessed by a narrow road that the currents hit hard, covering it with branches and debris.
They already took away the mangroves that protected it and now they tear pieces of it.
It has been rebuilt a couple of times, but here nothing resists the tireless onslaught of water.
What you see now is not what it used to be, they insist upon reaching El Bosque while the sea roars at the back of their necks.
“The beach was very far, very far away, our uncle Bartolo would take us in his wagon,” says Ana Bárbara Cardoza;
"I was lazy to go," says Viviana Fernández, and the two laugh while the water already covers the flip-flops on their feet.
As if they were historians, the residents reconstruct with photos that what was here was a "huge and very beautiful" beach, where you could run and fish.
To the rear there was a "mountain" of bushes and bushes, which could be seen from the sand dunes, then a curtain of pine trees and at the end, until the end, they insist, the houses remained.
Now?
Viviana Fernández points to the water and explains everything: "Where those sticks are, it was my mother's house."
In the distance there are collapsed buildings that look like cement islands, structures deformed by saltpeter blows on the shore, overturned trees that expose giant roots, gardens covered in sand, cracked houses, flooded streets, defenseless trenches made of tires and bottles.
And the sea remains, immune to the tragedy.
For Lupe Cobos, it all began with the mega-flood of Villahermosa in 2007, when enough water was released to fill the Azteca Stadium, in Mexico City, in just 15 minutes, according to the Government.
Satellite images show that from 2005 to 2010 the water ate almost a hundred meters of El Bosque beach.
But the final blow began in 2019 when the sea came in to take the first row of houses.
Since then two more rows have followed;
While this report is being written, the next one is breaking.
In total there are about 40 houses, in addition to a complete street, with its trees and lighting, a couple of churches and the school cafeteria.
Two years have passed since November 16, 2019 and since then Celia Figarola has only stepped on the blue floor of her old house three times.
The first was to quickly get everything about her out of it, the other two to show it to the journalists.
"What you see now is no longer a home, but it was," she says, still serene.
Even bent, the structure maintains standing some pieces of wall, a column and the spaces of the windows.
While Doña Celia speaks, the waves come in furiously: “Before we got out, the swell was already hitting us behind in the rooms, we used to say open the window and instead of air, water came in, like now, but at night it's even worse”.
“We had not taken anything, because we did not want to leave the house.
We were, now yes, clinging to the fact that the sea was not going to take it away from us, ”she admits within this silhouette of a defeated giant.
Cristina Pacheco observes a tree that disappears in the waves.
Gladys Serrano
Celia's house or Victoria Coto's are the examples used in the town to illustrate the seriousness of the problem, because they were “material houses”, that is, made of cement and concrete.
The one from Cobos was long and "big", its owner acknowledges.
It had three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a kitchen.
It was painted green.
“We were living there, but the house was dug down, the sea dug it up and it was left in the air.
One day my son stopped and saw that a part of his room was collapsing, and we already saw: the house was hollow below, the sea entered from side to side, the sea entered like this and collapsed it like that”.
The day Victoria had to leave, the water had already soaked her sheets.
In January 2021 she left with two of her children and her three grandchildren.
Since then they have lived in the pastoral house of the church, which is still standing.
They resist with the help of the parish priest and the neighbors.
"Once they are in this dynamic of losing territory, which has accelerated for about three years, the most appropriate thing is not to stay," says the specialist in Territorial Diagnosis Lilia Gama, who went to the community to explain the problem to its neighbors and its link to climate change: "Today we are having stronger events, rain and wind, and in these vulnerable areas, a significant part of the coast can be washed away."
Lilia Gama, a Coastal Dynamics researcher at the Universidad de Juárez Autónoma de Tabasco, explains that El Bosque is located in a very dynamic area such as the mouths of rivers, whose sediment load sometimes gives and sometimes takes away.
With the peculiarity that this town suffers from the other side the onslaught of the sea.
As Cristina Pacheco, spokeswoman for the community, sums up: "We are trapped, there is nowhere else to go."
Tabasco is one of the most vulnerable areas in Mexico to climate change: a State so flat that some towns are even below sea level;
so flat that it makes the great rivers that run through it, such as the Usumacinta, one of the mightiest in the country, travel more slowly for kilometers, twist, slip, overflow.
In addition, the area is hit, on the one hand, by tropical events such as hurricanes —although to a lesser extent than in the Caribbean or the Pacific— and the so-called north, the fronts that come loaded with cold rains and strong winds.
Those are prayed to and feared in El Bosque.
In the village they are counted by season, from November to March.
In the previous one there were 52 and everyone remembers number 28. “It was about 70 [kilometres per hour] north, we were putting up a house that they had lent us for when we had to leave ours and my children came running: ' Mom, the water is already coming in."
We had a few minutes to get it all out,” says Viviana Fernández, now surrounded by the stove, the mattresses, the television that they saved and which, now, is once again surrounded by water.
Viviana Velazquez with her son inside a house where she lives provisionally after losing her home due to rising sea levels. Gladys Serrano
The tenth north of the season has already arrived.
There are about 40 to go and Francisco Balcázar does not believe that his house can hold up.
"Last night, we already slept with the sea out", he says shyly sitting on a thin mattress.
As happens to many, this 26-year-old lives awake due to the fear of waking up with the sea on top of him and, as happens to many, he no longer has anywhere to go.
In the town there are no houses left to lend or land to occupy.
The municipal secretary of Frontera, Juan Sánchez, the head of which El Bosque depends on, has acknowledged to EL PAÍS that relocation has become an urgent need, that there is no more time left.
At the close of this report it has not yet happened.
With the nets, the boats and the jaiberos at the door, the residents have resigned themselves to waiting: for the government to relocate them or for the water to carry them away, whichever happens first.
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