Chixoy Dam Reparations Campaign

Summary history
Genocide
Faulty Project
Little Compensation; No Reparations
Struggle for Justice
Struggle for Compensation and Reparations

Summary history

In 1954, the US government orchestrated and helped carry out the violent overthrown of a democratic Guatemala government. Since that time, through to the late 90s, Guatemala was ruled by an oligarchic military regime. During this time, the Guatemalan regime was funded, trained, armed and otherwise supported by the US. The worst years of State repression occurred in the late 70s, and into the 1980s.

During these worst years of State-sponsored repression -- referred to as la violencia [the violence] -- carried out against a mainly Mayan civilian population, the executive committees of the World Bank (WB) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) decided to fund the construction of the Chixoy hydroelectric dam in the municipality of Rabinal, Department of Baja Verapaz, Guatemala.

The projected flood basin of the Chixoy Dam was inhabited by Mayan Achi communities that had lived there for hundreds of years. The village of Rio Negro was opposed to the construction of the dam. In large part as a result of their peaceful opposition to the project, and being obliged to resettle elsewhere, more than 440 community members were assassinated or killed in a series of massacres.

The filling of the dam basin began in January 1983, shortly after the final massacre in September 1982. After the massacres and filling of the Chixoy dam basin, both the World Bank and the IDB gave further loans to the military regime of Guatemala to complete the project. In total, the WB and IDB loaned the regimes more than $290,000,000 for the project.

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Genocide

In February 1999, the United Nations sponsored Commission for Historical Clarification ("Truth Commission") released a report -- Memoria del Silencio -- which states that approximately 200,000 Guatemalans were killed in Guatemala between 1960 and 1996. Of the victims, 94% were killed by Guatemalan state forces, 3% by undetermined parties and 3% by the URNG revolutionary movement.

Memoria del Silencio concluded that in certain Mayan-dominated regions of the country, Guatemalan security forces planned and carried out genocide. Rabinal -- where the Chixoy dam was built -- was one such region where genocide was planned and carried out, as defined by the UN Convention on Genocide.

The Truth Commission concluded that the four massacres, the arbitrary executions of other members of the community before and after the massacres, and the harsh living conditions (due to flight from the massacres and the forced resettlement) that resulted in the deaths of numerous massacres survivors, together demonstrate the intent of the Army to destroy Rio Negro.

Faulty Project

Financially and technically the dam was a failure. Originally, the project's construction was estimated to cost $270 million dollars. Currently the final cost is estimate to be $1.2 billion, although some estimates range as high as $2.5 billion. There are ongoing energy production problems. Sedimentation is building in the river basin. Some estimate that the "life of the dam" may end within 20 years, considerably shorter than initial predictions. In 1991, 45% of Guatemala's foreign debt was derived from the Chixoy dam project and in 1995, 51% of the national electric company's revenues were used to service the foreign debt.

Little Compensation; No Reparations

In the 70s, leading up to construction, there was never an honest and open process of consultation and negotiation. The people of Rio Negro were told they would have to resettle. This was a classic "development" project imposed from the top down. When they opposed this imposition, the repression began.

And yet, even with the imposed conditions of resettlement, the massacre survivors from Rio Negro have never received even close to adequate compensation for all that was taken from them (land, homes, river, personal property, orchards, crops, sacred sites, burial grounds, etc.), much less reparations for the violence perpetrated against them. For close to twenty years, most surviving victims from Rio Negro have lived in conditions of poverty, repression and psychological trauma.

Struggle for Justice

It wasn't until 1993 that levels of repression in Guatemala decreased to such a point that brave individuals could begin to publicly denounce the crimes and atrocities of the past and begin to seek justice and redress for the loss of life and property.

In Rabinal, Rio Negro survivors formed their own self-help human rights organization to exhume the mass grave that contained the remains of 177 women and children massacred on March 13, 1982. Since that time, a local human rights group, now called ADIVIMA, has grown and is supporting exhumations and human rights work throughout Rabinal.

In the context of these first exhumations, the Rio Negro survivors - most living in the military controlled community of Pacux (outside the town of Rabinal) - formed their own committee to denounce what happened to them before, during and after the construction of the Chixoy dam, and to seek reparations from the Guatemalan government, the WB and the IDB.

In 1996, the US-based organization Witness for Peace published "A People Dammed" that drew international attention to the repression that the people of Rio Negro suffered in the context of the Chixoy dam.

Struggle for Compensation and Reparations

Since 1996, while there has been increasing attention on the situation of the Rio Negro survivors, only a few small steps have been taken to provide the survivors with some of the compensation they should have received 18 years ago; nothing has been done to provide then with reparations.

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1 Letter of Intent
2 Background and summary
3 Demands