2 years after Mexico relocated their climate-ravaged community, residents struggle to adapt

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Lessons learned from a rushed resettlement in Mexico underscore what governments owe to climate-displaced communities — not only after homes wash away, but also long before.

This story was produced by Drilled, a global multimedia reporting project focused on climate accountability, and is co-published with Grist.​

It’s 3 a.m. and the beach in El Bosque, in southeast Mexico, is humming with small talk and laughter as Viviana Velázquez eases out of her hammock and dashes to the shoreline to greet a boat returning with the night’s catch. Velázquez, 38, and her 13-year-old daughter, Marlene, help the tired fishermen unload the ice boxes and heave a plastic crate full of bonito to the cooperative to be weighed.

The captain pays Velázquez for her help in fish. She saves a couple to fry for breakfast and cashes in the rest for 50 pesos, the equivalent of about $3, and heads back to her hammock, where some friends are eating pastries while catching up on the past week’s dramas.

This work is known locally as garrulear. For decades it was an important source of income, food, and bonding for women in El Bosque, a small fishing community in the state of Tabasco located on a narrow peninsula sandwiched between the Gulf of Mexico and the Usumacinta River. It is one of the things that Velázquez misses most since sea level rise forced residents to leave.

“In El Bosque I would garrulear every day, but then the sea took everything,” said Velázquez, as she settled back into a hammock. “Now I’m stuck inside most of the time; it’s too far to come here often.”

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El Bosque became the first community in Mexico to be recognized as displaced by climate change in 2023. By then, coastal erosion and flooding from storm surge had already damaged or swept away more than half of the hundred or so homes in the area. After a high-profile media campaign and several administrative claims by a coalition of environmental justice organizations working with residents of El Bosque, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador pledged to relocate them.

In November…

The…

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