San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chis. Approximately 100,000 hectares of cropland and pastureland located in various regions of Chiapas have been affected by the drought caused by the El Niño phenomenon, which has left more than 10,000 campesinos along the country’s southern border on the brink of disaster, according to reports from August 2026, said Antonino García, a researcher at the Autonomous University of Chapingo.
He added that the regions most affected so far are the Sierra, the Selva, the Comiteca Plateau, Palenque, and the Central Depression, while noting that the drought “is already leaving a trail of lost crops, bankrupt campesinos, and a humanitarian crisis that is worsening day by day” in Chiapas.
He asserted that “in the Frailesca region, the drought has put up to 40 percent of the corn crops at risk,” which serve as the staple food for thousands of families. In the Meseta Comiteca region, he added, 45,000 hectares of corn have been affected.
“Chiapas is the epicenter of the crisis: drought, hunger, and despair. The effects are not in the future—they are already a reality,” the researcher emphasized in a document, in which he noted that campesinos in Comitán and La Independencia, for example, “are desperate.”
He pointed out that “the impact is not only economic. Experience from previous events (1997–1998 and 2015–2017) reveals a spiral of consequences that are rarely mentioned in official reports: forced migration—the lack of jobs and food drives families to abandon their communities; increased violence—competition for scarce resources (water, land, food, jobs) exacerbates social conflicts; mental health crises: depression and despair—especially among older adults who see their world crumbling—are a silent but lethal factor.”
Furthermore, “Chiapas, which already has the highest rates of marginalization and poverty in the country, thus becomes a barometer of a systemic failure.”
He stated that “while the forecast is alarming, the institutional response capacity is even more concerning.” A study conducted between 2017 and 2018 for the book *The Usumacinta River Basin from the Perspective of Climate Change*, published by the Autonomous University of Chapingo and the Mexican Institute of Water Technology (IMTA), and coordinated by him and his colleague Denise Soares, “revealed a chilling fact: of the 72 weather stations that the National Water Commission (Conagua) had registered in that basin, only 28 generated consistent data. The rest operated using information fabricated by the staff themselves.”
In other words, he added, “it was junk data,” according to the study authors’ summary, which “means that official predictions, rainfall forecasts, and early warnings are built on a foundation of fiction.”
But the problem isn’t just about the climate, he asserted, since “scientific research and documented negligence reveal that Mexico’s weather monitoring system is in shambles: stations with fabricated data, abandoned radars, and a total disconnect between scientific knowledge and the ancestral wisdom of peasant and Indigenous communities, who for 9,000 years have known how to read the sky and the earth.”
García also said that “one of the most critical and least-discussed aspects is the disconnect between official science and peasant and Indigenous knowledge. While the National Meteorological Service presents its forecasts daily on computer screens and they are interpreted by experts, that information does not reach the communities. There is no plan to translate it, disseminate it, and, above all, combine it with the ancestral knowledge that the peasant and indigenous peoples of Chiapas have accumulated over millennia.”
He argued that “this knowledge, based on the observation of bird behavior, plant blooming, the position of the stars, the direction of the wind, and the moon, has allowed communities to make crucial decisions: to plant because it is going to rain, or not to plant so as not to lose the seed. Ignoring this knowledge is not only an act of technical negligence but also of cultural contempt that leaves communities defenseless.”
He recalled that “the great Maya civilization had a scientific foundation in astronomy and the prediction of atmospheric phenomena dating back millennia. Western science, with its scientific method, is only about 420 years old (Francis Bacon). Thus, today’s indigenous Mayan campesinos preserve, through oral tradition, knowledge regarding the prediction of atmospheric phenomena that must be recognized and valued.”
The researcher stated that, in this context, “adaptation to climate change cannot be reduced to building more dams or distributing food aid, but rather requires a comprehensive approach that includes: an audit and immediate rehabilitation of the network of weather stations and radars; a dialogue of knowledge: a genuine bridge between scientists and rural and Indigenous communities; as well as multisectoral public policies that address employment, mental health, migration, and food security in a coordinated manner, along with the budget and political will to sustain critical infrastructure.”
Original text by Elio Henríquez published by La Jornada on August 30th, 2026.
Translated by Schools for Chiapas.