Latam | El Niño, a child with different personalities

When people talk about El Niño, they often picture a single phenomenon: the Pacific warms up and the climate changes. But that oversimplification is misleading. El Niño is born in the same ocean, yet it doesn't reach every country in the same way. AcrossLatin America, it can bring droughts, torrential rainfall, or warm coastal waters.Nor are its economic impacts the same everywhere.

According to the metrics, El Niño is already here. In June 2026, the sea surface temperature anomaly in the central Pacific exceeded its threshold by more than 1°C. Moreover, these conditions are expected to remain at least strong until early 2027. This phenomenon is cyclical; however, science suggests that anthropogenic climate change is increasing its frequency and severity.

This is not merely a climatological anecdote, but rather a shock that can alter harvests, prices, exports, and even central bank decisions. The question is not whether the Pacific exceeds a certain temperature threshold, but how that anomaly is transmitted to each territory.

Argentina illustrates this ambivalence. In the Pampas, El Niño usually brings more rain, which can alleviate droughts and favor crops like soybeans and maize. For an economy where these products account for a significant share of exports, this transmission channel can be positive. Nevertheless, the same rainfall that benefits agriculture can also cause rivers to overflow, damage infrastructure and increase logistics costs.

In Colombia, the story is almost the opposite. El Niño is generally associated with lower rainfall and higher temperatures, especially in the Andean and Caribbean regions. The impact on agriculture can feed into food prices, creating inflationary pressures. In addition, a power system dependent on hydroelectric generation suffers when the available water in reservoirs decreases. Thus, this phenomenon ends up affecting grocery bills and the cost of generating electricity.

Peru experiences the most direct impact. There, warming of coastal waters can disrupt marine productivity, affecting fisheries, exports, and revenues. This is compounded by the damage caused by intense rainfall infrastructure, agriculture, and economic activity as a whole, with significant impacts in terms of GDP while also pushing inflation. Such circumstances can pose a dilemma for monetary policy. However, if the increase in prices proves temporary and inflation expectations remain well anchored, the central bank may decide not to respond.

There is no single El Niño. Rather, there are different climatic expressions of the same phenomenon, with effects that can extend beyond Argentina, Colombia, or Peru. Its economic consequences differ because the climatology, productive structure, and transmission mechanisms of each economy also differ.