QUEJA, Guatemala — Orlando Chavez tucks into his lunch of five corn tortillas and a piece of cheese but admits that “some days I don’t eat.”
The 71-year-old lives in El Progreso, a region of Honduras that has been devastated recently by two hurricanes and the pandemic.
The area is emblematic of a trifecta of issues affecting many Central Americans — environmental degradation, the coronavirus and profound poverty.
Chavez’s battered mud hut is one of the few still standing after hurricanes Eta and Iota ripped through the region in November 2020, pounding villages into heaps of scrap wood and zinc roofs.
Across the border in Guatemala, German Cal Pop, an indigenous Ma…
Keep on reading: Hurricanes, COVID-19 heap misery on impoverished Central America