NGOs Demand World Bank Investigation Into Massacres
Report Reveals 376 Murdered After Resisting Eviction
International Rivers and
Witness for Peace
International Rivers and human rights group
Witness for
Peace have today written to World Bank President James
Wolfensohn
calling for an independent investigation into World Bank
involvement
with Guatemala’s Chixoy Dam. A recent report from Witness for
Peace* reveals that between 1980 and
1982
some 376 people, mostly women and children, were brutally
murdered in a
series of massacres when they resisted eviction
from their village of
Río Negro to make way for the Chixoy
Reservoir.
The
World Bank and Inter–American Development Bank (IDB) both
gave two loans
for the Chixoy Dam, the World Bank’s second loan
being made in 1985 –
after the massacres took place. Internal
reports from the World Bank and
IDB refer to problems with resettlement
at Chixoy but nowhere mention
that more than one in ten of the
people supposed to be resettled were
murdered shortly before the
reservoir filled.
After years of
living in fear, survivors of the atrocities first
began to speak to
outsiders in 1993. In November of that year
forensic experts began to
exhume the bodies from the largest massacre.
The Witness for
Peace report says:
- "If the [World] Bank knew about the massacres, then giving an additional loan to the project was at best a calculated cover up, and at worst an act of complicity in the violence. If the Bank did not know about the slaughter, then it was guilty of gross negligence. Either way, the Bank is implicated in the horrors perpetrated against the village of Río Negro in 1982."
Patrick McCully, Campaigns Director of International Rivers Network says:
- "We believe that these shocking revelations require an independent investigation to discover whether or not Bank project staff knew about the massacres and if so why these were not reported in subsequent Bank documents. If it is concluded that Bank staff were unaware of the massacres then it should be investigated how they were able to remain ignorant.
- "The Chixoy massacres hold important lessons for the consequences of funding forced resettlement in countries with repressive regimes. An investigation into this matter is also extremely important given the tendency seen in other projects for Bank staff to ignore or suppress information on the real impacts of their projects on local people."
While the Río Negro massacres
occured in the context of
the brutal government counterinsurgency
campaign which left 72,000
Guatemalans dead or missing between 1980 and
1984 alone, local
church workers, journalists and the survivors
themselves all directly
link the massacres to attempts to evacuate the
reservoir area.
All deny that there was ever any organized guerrilla
activity
in Río Negro.
* A People Dammed: The World
Bank–Funded
Chixoy Hydroelectric Project and its
Devastating Impacts
on the People and Economy of Guatemala.
Witness for Peace,
Washington, DC, May 1996.
Background
The campaign of terror against the indigenous Maya Achí
community of Río Negro began in early 1980 after the villagers
refused to move to the cramped houses and poor land at the resettlement
site provided by the Guatemalan power utility INDE. In March 1980,
military policemen based at the dam site shot seven people in
Río
Negro. The villagers chased the police away and one,
according to the
people of Río Negro, drowned in the Chixoy
River. INDE and the
army, however, accused the villagers of murdering
the policeman and of
being supporters of the country’s guerrilla
movement.
In July
1980, two representatives from Río Negro agreed
to a request from
INDE to come to the dam site to present their
resettlement documents. The
mutilated bodies of the two men were
found a week later. The documents
were never found.
In February 1982, 73 men and women from
Río Negro were
ordered by the local military commander to report
to Xococ, a
village upstream from the reservoir zone which had a history
of
land conflicts and hostility with Río Negro. Only one woman
out
of the 73 villagers returned to Río Negro – the rest
were raped,
tortured and then murdered by Xococ’s Civil Defense
Patrol, or PAC, one
of the notorious paramilitary units used by
the state as death squads.
On March 13, 1982, ten soldiers and 25 patrollers arrived in
Río
Negro, rounded up the remaining women and children and marched
them to a hill above the village.
Witness for Peace’s harrowing
account of what happened on the
hill is pieced together from interviews
with survivors.
- "They were strangling many of the women by putting ropes around their necks and twisting the ropes with sticks. They were also beating other women with clubs and rifles, and kicking and punching them. ‘I remember one woman, ‘ [Jaime, a survivor who was ten years old at the time] relates, ‘a soldier jumped up and kicked her in the back. He must have broken her spine, because she tried to get up but her legs wouldn’t move. Then he smashed her skull with his rifle’.
- "The patrollers killed the children by tying ropes around their ankles and swinging them, smashing their heads and bodies into rocks and trees."
Seventy
women and 107 children were killed. Only two women
managed to escape.
Eighteen children were taken back to Xococ
as slaves for the
patrollers.
Two months later, 82 more people from Río
Negro were massacred.
In September, 35 orphaned children from Río
Negro were
among 92 people machine gunned and burned to death in another
village near the dam. Reservoir filling began soon after this
final
massacre.
The Witness for Peace report states that, ‘the
Río Negro
victims died because they blocked the
"progress" of
the Chixoy Project’. Many villagers believe INDE
encouraged the
violence so that their officials could pocket compensation
payments
due to the villagers. ‘I’ll tell you the real reason for the
violence’,
one survivor said, ‘they wanted our land for their cursed
reservoir
and dam, and we were in the way’. A member of a Guatemalan
human
rights group says: ‘The Chixoy Dam was built with the blood of
the
inhabitants of Río Negro’.
The IDB lent Guatemala $105
million to build Chixoy in 1975 and
a further $70 million in 1981. The
World Bank lent $72 million
for the dam in 1978 and another $45 million
in 1985. The banks
appear to have turned a blind eye to the massacres and
to have
refused to acknowledge them in project documents: no references
to the massacres are made in any of the funders’ internal reports
on
Chixoy which outside researchers have been able to obtain.
According to local people, everyone at the dam site and virtually
everyone in the region knew about the massacres. Nine World Bank
missions
visited the dam in the years following the massacres.
In early 1984 the
Bank employed an expert to supervise the resettlement
operation.
The closest the World Bank’s confidential 1991 ‘Project Completion
Report’ on Chixoy comes to mentioning the mass murders is a reference
to
the resettlement plans as ‘conceptually . . . seriously flawed’
and a
mention of ‘delays in implementing the program due to intensive
insurgency activity in the project area during the years 1980–1983
– two
resettlement officers were killed while performing their
duties . . .’
Chixoy was not only a human rights disaster. Construction was
beset with geological problems which – together with corruption
– caused
the dam’s total cost to soar to some $1.2 billion, 521
per cent higher
than forecast in 1974. The dam began official
operation in 1983, but
after only five months had to be shut down
for repairs. It did not
restart operation for two years. Since
then it has been plagued with
technical problems and a shortage
of water in its reservoir.
The World Bank’s Project Completion Report says that ‘With hindsight
[Chixoy Dam] has proved to be an unwise and uneconomic disaster’.
Witness for Peace as part of the Campaign for Peace and Life in
Guatemala have helped survivors of the Río Negro massacres
build a
monument honoring those murdered. (ENDS)
Contact Tom Ricker, Witness for Peace at (202) 544 0781 for additional information.