Displaced #3 – Destination Latin America, July 2024

DISPLACED – Latin America

Evocative stories of people who have to leave their homes due to climate change.

Since our last newsletter, the global situation has taken another turn for the worse with the election of Donald Trump as the next US president. A sense of general insecurity has increased with such an unpredictable person at the reins of the most powerful nation. This is especially true when it comes to climate change, which Trump claims does not exist. For us, Trump’s election has further strengthened our conviction of the importance of our work. Trump and his sympathizers don’t want climate change to be an issue and the people we portray to have a voice. And that is precisely why it is important not to allow this to happen!

The first pictures from our work are currently on display at COP29 in Baku for the first time. However, this is only a small preview of the full-scale exhibition that will be shown at the climate conference in Belem, Brazil, in a year’s time. But we still have a lot of work and some traveling to do before we get there.

We have had some very good news from the IOM, our main partner at the UN. They are very happy with the initial results and, knowing that our project is still severely underfunded, they have increased their project contribution by $30,000. We are all the more pleased about this as it is becoming increasingly clear that the current global political and economic uncertainty means that raising additional funds for the project is a major challenge. A challenge that we gladly accept!

Cordially & see you soon

Mathias & Monika

BRASCHLER/FISCHER
braschlerfischer.com
+41 79 205 0330

---

In spring, Brazil’s southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul was hit by heavy torrential rain. This resulted in the worst flooding in Brazil’s modern history, with the metropolis of Porto Alegre being particularly badly affected. Hundreds of people died and around 600,000 people were displaced.

After our trip to the USA, we made our way to the south of Brazil at the end of July to visit the region. Almost 3 months after huge masses of water had poured through parts of the city of millions, the clean-up work was well advanced. There was huge solidarity among the population and many people volunteered to help with the clean-up work. However, the traces of the flood were still clearly visible, especially in the poorer areas of the city, where many people’s homes were completely destroyed or so badly damaged that they were no longer habitable. The IOM, our main partner at the UN, had set up 3 large emergency shelters in the form of huge tents containing countless tiny housing units in which hundreds of people were living provisionally. Most of these people, who almost without exception came from the poorest regions of the city, faced an uncertain future as they had lost everything.

We were also generously supported by volunteers on site. For example, we were able to live with Manoela, a professor of dentistry, whose house remained undamaged and who actively helped with the clean-up work. Isa, one of her students, and her friends and family supported us as guides, and Ana, a 20-year-old filmmaker, accompanied us for 5 days as a translator and became something like Elias’ big sister.

We portrayed various people living in the IOM shelter, and we were particularly impressed by our meeting with Pedro and his 6-year-old daughter Luizza. There are many single mothers in Brazil. Single fathers are rather rare. Even rarer are those who were gang members and had spent half their lives in prison. All of this applied to Pedro, who told in an impressive interview how he ended up on the street at the age of 11, became part of a gang, but would only have killed bad people for them, e.g. rapists and wife-beaters. Today, Pedro’s whole purpose in life is Luizza, whom he wants to give a better life than he had himself. In an emotional interview, he told us how he lost everything and how he still doesn’t know how to explain to his daughter that their house no longer exists.

However, he then agreed to take us to his property and show his daughter for the first time that the big flood had completely destroyed their home. As Pedro was the main character in our video story, we wanted to film him and Luizza on his property. However, we were not given permission to do this, although this filming ban was not issued by the police or the authorities, but by the local gang that controlled the neighborhood. We then agreed to go with Pedro and Luizza to the nearby highway bridge, where they had been able to save themselves during the flood and from where we had a view of his property. There really was nothing left of their house, and it wasn’t Pedro who had to comfort his daughter, but Luizza her father, tears streaming down his face at the sight of total destruction.

From Brazil we went on to Guatemala, our second destination in Latin America. Here we were supported perfectly by our second UN partner, the World Food Programme. They put together an ambitious program with destinations in the most diverse regions of the country. We drove almost 1500 km through Guatemala in 6 days in a UN Land Cruiser. Which may not sound like much, if you ignore the fact that the roads in this Central American nation are probably some of the most winding in the world. We were not unhappy to have Alberto, the WFP’s most experienced driver in Guatemala, at our side. This was even more the case when we drove to a remote village for the first time, which was situated on a range of hills and could only be reached via a winding, extremely steep and unpaved road.

Parts of Guatemala are situated in the Dry Corridor, a region of Central America that is becoming increasingly arid, with corresponding consequences for the local population, most of whom work in agriculture. At the same time, the country also struggles with heavy precipitation in other regions, which repeatedly leads to landslides and flooding in a country with such steep topography. As in so many places around the world, water is the factor that makes climate change tangible and visible. There is too much or too little of it.

We also experienced heavy downpours, which meant that our road, which led through a narrow valley, was partially buried again and again, but fortunately this was not a big problem for Alberto and his Land Cruiser this time. Fittingly, the next day we visited a Mayan village that had had to be relocated due to flooding. We were welcomed very warmly by the inhabitants of the village, where there was neither running water nor electricity. In addition to the fact that they had to relocate their entire village, they also had to deal with the ever-increasing heat. A heat that we also had to experience when filming and photographing. After the work was done, Mathias’ T-shirt was as wet as if he had jumped into a river.

Migration is also a major topic in Guatemala. On the one hand, it is a transit country for many migrants traveling from the south towards the USA. On the other hand, many Guatemalans also make their own way north. Unfortunately, climate change often plays a significant role here too.

In a remote village near the Mexican border, we met several women whose husbands had made the arduous and dangerous journey to the USA. Angelica, a young mother, described how painful it was when her husband had to leave her and his children behind. But the ever-increasing drought caused more and more problems in the maize crop, which eventually led to her husband paying $10,000 to traffickers in the hope that they would bring him to the USA.

After three adventurous weeks in Latin America, we returned to Switzerland at the beginning of August, from where we made more stories in September about people who had lost their homes in Switzerland, Italy and Germany. And tomorrow we continue with our 2nd trip to Africa, this time to Kenya.