Luis Aviles, standing on a segment of the rock embankment that protects riverbank communities from the overflow of the Lempa River in southern El Salvador, points to the part of the river that makes a turn in its course and hits the levee hard, undermining it. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPSLuis Aviles, standing on a segment of the rock embankment that protects riverbank communities from the overflow of the Lempa River in southern El Salvador, points to the part of the river that makes a turn in its course and hits the levee hard, undermining it. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS by Edgardo Ayala (tecoluca, el salvador) Thursday, November 30, 2023 Inter Press Service TECOLUCA, El Salvador, Nov 30 (IPS) – For farmers in the valleys below the 15 de Septiembre hydroelectric plant in central El Salvador, the rains bring floods. Now that the rains are more unpredictable, the loss of crops and disruption of fishing are even more devastating as they deal with erratic climate-change-induced flooding. For decades, poor fishing and farming communities in southern El Salvador have paid the price for the electricity generated by one of the country’s five dams, as constant and sometimes extreme rains cause the reservoir to release water that ends up flooding the low-lying area where the families live.
Dozens of communities located in the Bajo Lempa area in southern El Salvador suffer year after year from flooding during the May to November rainy season, when the river overflows its banks and floods corn, beans, and other crops, as well as affecting fishing and other livelihoods.
The ecoregion is the lower stretch of the Lempa River basin, which runs through three Central American countries: it originates in Guatemala, crosses part of Honduras, and then enters El Salvador, where it meanders from the north until flowing into the Pacific Ocean in the south of the country.
The Lempa River basin covers 18,240 square kilometers, shared with Honduras (30 percent) and Guatemala (14 percent). In El Salvador, it stretches across slightly more than half of the territory of just over 21,000 square kilometers.
An estimated 5,000 families live in the 900-square-kilometer Bajo Lempa area. They are dedicated to subsistence farming and fishing and non-intensive cattle ranching, although there are also some families from other regions of the country, with more money, who have acquired land to grow sugar cane. Celina Menjívar (R), a resident of San Bartolo, one of the ten settlements located in the Bajo Lempa area near the mouth of the river on the Pacific Ocean, participates in a neighborhood meeting. She makes the case that the Salvadoran government ought to reimburse local families for the crops they lost as a result of flooding from an upstream dam. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS “In the 32 years that I have lived here, I have been affected just like the rest by many floods,” Celina Menjívar told IPS. She is a farmer in San Bartolo, one of the settlements or communities of Bajo Lempa.
“I plant corn, sesame, and cushaw squash (Cucurbita argyrosperma) on a small family plot, but when the floods come, everything is lost, and in the end we are left with nothing,” said Menjívar, 41.
In addition to subsistence farming, a group of some 50 families set up a cooperative for the organic production of cashew nuts, which they were able to export to the United States, France, and the United Kingdom after achieving certification as organic producers. An aerial view of the state-owned 15 de Septiembre Hydroelectric Power Plant, the largest in El Salvador. The reservoir discharges when rainfall exceeds its storage capacity, causing the Lempa River to overflow and flood dozens of farming and fishing communities in the Bajo Lempa area. Credit: CEL But rising production costs and competition from cheaper prices, especially from India, have hampered exports in the last two years. The cooperative is therefore looking to promote new products, such as pistachios and peanuts.
“We have made an effort to ensure that the farmers can at least sell their cashew seeds” on the domestic market, the cooperative’s administrative coordinator, Brenda Cerén, told IPS. Impact on the Most Vulnerable Most of the residents of Bajo Lempa were part of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) guerrillas, who settled on the riverbanks after receiving land in the region as part of the demobilization process at the end of the civil war in 1992.
El Salvador’s bloody civil war (1980–1992) left some 75,000 people dead and 8,000 missing in a country that currently has 7.6 million inhabitants.
“Most of the flooding is not due to the rains per se, but to the discharges from the reservoir,” said Menjívar, referring to the state-owned 15 de Septiembre hydroelectric plant, the country’s largest, located upstream between the departments of San Vicente and Usulután, in central El Salvador. Manuel Mejía is one of the former guerrilla fighters who received a hectare of land in Bajo Lempa in southern El Salvador, to settle there as part of the demobilization process of the rebel forces at the end of the 12-year Salvadoran civil war in 1992. Now, when the area is flooded by the overflowing river, he says everything is lost, even household goods. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS Another resident of San Bartolo, Manuel Mejía, added: “When there are floods here, everything is lost: crops, livestock, even household goods, everything.”
Mejía, a 77-year-old former guerrilla fighter, told IPS that this year’s rainy season did not produce flooding because the storms began late, and this meant that the drainage channels, located along the road leading to the area, did not fill up and were able to handle the rainfall at the end of the rainy season in November.
Increasingly unpredictable and extreme rainfall periods, due to climate change, generate intense storms in short periods of time, and, as a consequence, the reservoir’s capacity is easily exceeded and water releases are authorized.
Hence, the poor families of Bajo Lempa pay the cost of the dam’s ability to generate electricity for other parts of the country, including those that generate the most income, such as industrial groups and real estate consortiums, whose business activities are among those that have the greatest impact on the environment. Part of the levee that has been undermined by the force of the waters of the Lempa River, near the Rancho Grande community in the Bajo Lempa, a coastal ecoregion located in the municipality of Tecoluca in southern El Salvador. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS This situation falls under the category of climate justice, or, actually, climate injustice: vulnerable groups are more heavily impacted by extreme weather events fomented by others, whether at the national or global level.
“Certainly there is climate injustice: richer people or sectors of the country, who live in urban areas, benefit more from energy, while poor families, who live on the banks of the rivers, take the hit,” environmentalist Ricardo Navarro, director of the Salvadoran Center for Appropriate Technology, told IPS.
The Center is a local affiliate of the international NGO Friends of the Earth.
A light rain that falls for two or three days generates releases from the dam and the overflowing of the Lempa River, which floods the settlements. But of course, the most tragic floods have been caused by tropical storms or hurricanes, such as Hurricane Mitch in October 1998. The Lempa River flows through three Central American countries: it originates in Guatemala, crosses part of Honduras, and then enters El Salvador, where it meanders from the north until it flows into the Pacific Ocean in the south of the country. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS Mitch, a category 5 hurricane, the most lethal, caused such heavy rains that the hydroelectric dam filled in a matter of 36 hours and went from discharging 500 cubic meters per second to 11,500 cubic meters per second, according to a study on flooding in the Lower Lempa.
“During Mitch, I lost 40 heads of cattle; they drowned,” Luis Avilés, a farmer from the Taura community, told IPS.
“Where we live is like living with a chronic illness; year after year we have this anxiety: wondering whether it will flood a lot this year, if I’ll lose my crops, not knowing whether to plant or not,” said Avilés, 53. The Lempa River flows through three Central American countries: it originates in Guatemala, crosses part of Honduras, and then enters El Salvador, where it meanders from the north until it flows into the Pacific Ocean in the south of the country. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS Embankment on the Verge of Collapse A crucial issue in the impact of the floods is the damage that has been suffered over the years to the levee built with Japanese aid funds years ago and which has not been repaired since then, residents of Bajo Lempa told IPS.
The elevation made of different materials on the river bank to contain the overflowing waters runs 18 kilometers along the right bank of the river, from the Cañada Arenera community, in the municipality of San Nicolás Lempa, to the community of La Pita, near the river’s mouth.
“We are in the most vulnerable area of the riverbank, the one that receives the strongest impact of the Lempa, because up there it makes a turn and then it flows down with force,” said Avilés, standing on the damaged infrastructure: a wall of rocks tied together with wire, about four meters higher than the level of the river. Drainage ditches can be seen alongside the road leading to Bajo Lempa in southern El Salvador, to drain the water that accumulates with the rains and floods that occur almost every year in this coastal region of El Salvador. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS This segment of the five-kilometer-long levee is indeed the most damaged; the flow of the river has been undermining the base of the wall more and more.
“This wall protects the communities of Santa Marta, San Bartolo, Rancho Grande, Taura, Puerto Nuevo, Naranjo, and La Pita, and if it were to collapse, it would be a great tragedy,” said Avilés, also a former guerrilla fighter.
The deterioration of the stone embankment is clearly visible along its five-kilometer length. The production of cooking bananas is one of the most profitable in the coastal area known as Bajo Lempa, although floods frequently swamp crops and ruin the harvests on family farms. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS The rest of the dike is not a stone wall but an earthen elevation about two meters high, and it is also damaged.
The repair and maintenance of the embankment is one of the main demands of the inhabitants of Bajo Lempa, but it has never been efficiently addressed by any of the past governments. Brena Cerén, administration coordinator, shows part of the organic cashew nut production just out of the ovens of the cooperative set up in San Carlos Lempa, in the Salvadoran municipality of Tecoluca. Cashew nut production in the coastal area of the country has a growing market in the United States and European countries. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS Compensation for Damage Avilés said it is obvious that the country needs to generate electricity “because many sectors, factories, industry, and homes depend on it, but we should also consider the cost that we pay down here,” referring to the energy produced by the 15 de Septiembre power plant.
This dam and the other four in the country are managed by the state-owned Comisión Ejecutiva Hidroeléctrica del Río Lempa (CEL). For this reason, he and the other people interviewed argued that the government should take responsibility for the damage and losses caused to gaming the families of Bajo Lempa and create an indemnity or compensation fund.
Avilés said that last year, when there was light flooding, he lost his crop of plantains or cooking bananas, which he had planted on a two-hectare plot. He went to claim compensation from CEL for the 15,000 dollars he had invested.
“They told me that they had nothing to do with it, that the dam was above us and the flooding was below,” he said. Sugarcane monoculture, practiced by families that have invaded and grabbed land in the coastal area of Bajo Lempa, in southern El Salvador, has damaged the fragile ecosystem of the area as it encourages the intensive use of agrochemicals and the burning of sugarcane fields, which often reach the crops of riverbank communities. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS Environmental activist Gabriel Labrador, of the NGO Salvadoran Ecological Unit (UES), told IPS that these families have every right to demand an economic compensation fund for losses and damage.
“It is an injustice—the discharges, the vulnerabilities to which people and territories are exposed—which is a systematic practice that is unjust and ends up burdening the most disadvantaged people with more damage and losses,” he said.
Meanwhile, the residents of Bajo Lempa, already accustomed to the floods, know that they have no choice but to continue fighting, despite the adversities.
“It would be fair for CEL to say, ‘We are going to help you, at least with 50 percent of what was lost’, but it doesn’t give anything. However, we have no choice but to keep working hard,” said Menjívar.
IPS UN Bureau Report Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau Follow IPS News UN Bureau on Instagram © Inter Press Service (2023) — All Rights Reserved Original source: Inter Press Service
Thursday, November 30, 2023
Salvadoran Rural Communities Face Climate Injustice — Global Issues
Elon Musk to Boycotting Advertisers: Go F*ck Yourselves
“Go fuck yourself.” Thus spake Elon Musk during a really weird chat with Dealbook’s Andrew Ross Sorkin on Wednesday night. At the New York Times sponsored event, the increasingly unhinged Tesla CEO said that he wouldn’t be “blackmailed” by advertisers who—in response to his recent, controversial comments —might pull their money from his flailing social media platform, X. Instead, Musk advised that any advertisers who were concerned about his most colorful ideations just consider fucking off instead. Amongst this newly christened demographic, Musk specifically singled out Disney CEO Bob Iger, whose company recently pulled its ads from X over a comment Musk had made that was widely deemed antisemitic: “Hi Bob!” Musk trolled, waving into the audience, after telling a bunch of potential revenue sources to just fuck right off. “Even AI Rappers are Harassed by Police” | AI Unlocked The whole episode was hilarious in the weird and terrible sort of way that only Musk-related events can be. Sporting, for some reason, a leather jacket that looked like it was culled from some sort of 1980s action movie, the edgelord billionaire proceeded to go off after Sorkin questioned him about his recent comments, asking him whether his more outlandish thoughts might be, you know, hurting his business interests. The conversation proceeded to go like this: MUSK: “I hope they stop.” SORKIN: “You what?” MUSK: “Don’t advertise.”
SORKIN: “You don’t want them to advertise?”
MUSK: “If somebody’s going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself.” SORKIN: “But—” MUSK: “Go…fuck…yourself.” I’d say I was shocked but, to be honest, Musk’s comments are very, very on-brand for him. In recent weeks, the unrepentant billionaire’s mouth has caused X (formerly Twitter) a good deal of trouble. In addition to a tweet that kicked off widespread accusations of antisemitism , he also, just yesterday, decided to tweet about pizzagate , which raised more than a few eyebrows. Advertisers have, in the case of the “Jewish” episode, responded by pulling their ads from the platform , thus costing the struggling site important financing.
But, as ever, Musk clearly isn’t interested gaming in a mea culpa (or, apparently, in salvaging the wounded cash flows of his company). Instead, he wants to stick to his guns—even if it tanks X as a result.
Weill Cornell Medicine to move into Sotheby’s Headquarters in New York – ARTnews.com
Sotheby’s will cede around half of the space at their Manhattan headquarters to a new neighbor, Weill Cornell Medicine (WCM), Cornell University’s medical school and research body. As first reported by Artnet News, WCM will begin moving in early next year with an anticipated opening date of late 2026. Sotheby’s has been the only entity in 1134 York Avenue since 2020, after billionaire Patrick Drahi bought the storied auction house in 2019 for $3.7 billion and took the company private. According to Artnet News, Sotheby’s has a lease on the 10-story building through 2035 with a yearly rent of $42.1 million, paid to a holding company set up by Drahi after the Sotheby’s purchase, which owns the news building. Related Articles Weill Cornell will lease 200,000 square feet of 1334 York Avenue, replacing Sotheby’s galleries on the fifth through the ninth floors with cutting-edge medical research equipment and laboratories. A source familiar with the arrangement said there will be no overlap between the Sotheby’s staff and the Weill Cornell staff. By the time WCM will have moved in, Sotheby’s will have relocated to the Breuer Building, which it purchased from the Whitney Museum of American Art earlier this year. The Breuer will serve as Sotheby’s new global headquarters. The real estate developments at 1334 York Avenue are part of a financial restructuring for Drahi, who has lately been evaluating his assets in the face of a $60 billion debt and significant tax charges in Switzerland. Drahi’s money troubles are compounded by allegations of money laundering and tax fraud by a fellow executive at his telecom-slash-media company, Altice. A spokesperson for the auction house told ARTnews that “the leasing of some of our space at 1334 York Avenue is a continuation of the strategic transformation of our operational process and client experience in New York. Sotheby’s will continue to host exhibitions and auctions without disruption at 1334 York Ave until 2025.”
Wednesday, November 29, 2023
The Inevitable You: Live Life by Design
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3 Tips for Hair Growth #shorts
3 Tips for Hair Growth #shorts
Dr. Janine shares three tips for hair growth. She explains that you should wash your hair often enough to wash out the DHT that builds up on news the scalp and causes hair loss. She talks about optimizing your minerals levels, especially iron and magnesium. Lastly, Dr. Janine explains that you should not tie your hair up too tightly, the scalp needs circulation and blood flow around the hair follicles to help hair growth. Follow for more natural health tips. Watch the Dr. Janine Show Live -Online every Tuesday at 11am EST -And chat with Dr. Janine live during the show.
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Why Fast Repair Techniques For Associate Advertising Programs Can Be An Error
Associate supervisors are constantly in search of methods to optimize process and enhance procedures. This can lead some email marketing to seek “fast repair” techniques that can push away or even worse, shed collaborations and stop them from expanding to their complete capacity. If you’re trying to find simple, one-size-fits-all options for your associate program issues, your […]