In Honduras, hard hit by drought, authorities hope to make it rain using contentious tactic

NUEVA CONCEPCION, Honduras (AP) — Victor Torres is on the hunt for clouds as he flies over parched corn fields ravaged by months of drought in the rugged Honduran mountains.“We’re seeing strong cloud cover over here,” the pilot says, pointing to a map on the dashboard as he banks the small plane sharply into a patch of dark gray.Behind him, a technician cranks the knob of a large metal tank, which hisses as it sprays yellow silver iodide particles into the skies. This “cloud seeding” is a gamble by the Honduran government, aiming to induce enough rain over enough fields to help farmers and their crops survive.The El Niño climate pattern, scrambling weather worldwide and now exacerbated by warming seas, has devastated communities across the Central American Dry Corridor, an arid region from southern Mexico through Panama.The effects are particularly acute in the dry forests of Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua, where corn and bean crops have dried up, leaving subsistence fa