Reparations for the Maya Achi Chixoy Dam Affected
Thu, 01/16/2014 - 7:47pm
By Monti Aguirre
The word reparations – feared by people in the world of infrastructure development – is finally starting to find a well-deserved and long-awaited place. Reparations means making up for a past wrong. US President Barack Obama is about to sign a bill that includes in its mandates reparations for the Maya Achi communities who were affected by construction of the Chixoy Dam in Guatemala. Financiers of the project – the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank – are now on the hook to right the wrongs that accompanied construction of the Chixoy Dam.
Financiers of large development projects have shunned away from admitting that some projects their institutions financed have caused harm. Consequentially, the damages caused to people and the environment do not get addressed and thousands of peoples’ lives are ruined and their livelihoods destroyed forever. This cannot continue to be so.
I began to learn of the horrors of what had happened to the Maya Achi when I first met community representative Carlos Chen in 1999. Surprisingly expressionless, lowering his eyes, Carlos spoke in a monotone before the World Commission on Dams in 1999 at the Public Hearing in Sao Paulo. Just minutes before, 26 buses had arrived with close to a thousand dam-affected people from Brazil. The auditorium got hot.
Three decades ago, in the midst of Guatemala’s civil war, Carlos’ community was persecuted, threatened and killed in the most horrendous ways to make way for the dam, he said. The Maya Achi suffered five massacres that chillingly took away the lives of more than 440 people. He described how children were taken by their feet and banged against rocks. I would later see one of those rocks and stand by a tree where some girls’ bodies had been dropped. Can you imagine that?
More:
http://www.internationalrivers.org/blogs/233/reparations-for-the-maya-achi-chixoy-dam-affected
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