Bloodied and damned
A letter of protest Was written on May 9, to the World Bank (W8) president James Wolfensohn, by the International Rivers Network and the human rights group Witness for Peace, calling for an independent investigation into the WB's involvement in the building of Guatemala's infamous Chixoy dam, which saw hundreds tortured and killed by government troops.
A recent report by the Witness of Peace has made a shocking revelation: between 1980-82, nearly 376 people - mostly women and children belonging to the indigenous Maya Achi community - were brutally murdered in a series of blood- curdling massacres when they resisted forced eviction from the village Rio Negro to cramped homes in inferior resettlement sites.
Two loans, one by the WB US $72 million - and the other by the Inter-American Development Bank - US $105 million - were lent to the repressive Guatemalan government for the construction of the Chixoy project. And worse, the B's second loan for the dam US $45 million - came about in 1985 after the brutalities had taken place.
' The Witness for Peace report states: "if the Bank knew about the massacres, then giving an additional loan for the project was at best a calculated cover up ... and 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 Rio Negro in 1982."
Patrick McCully, campaign director of the International Rivers Network, says, "The Chixoy massacres hold important lessons for the consequences of funding forced resettlement in countries with repressive regimes." The closest the WB's 1991 'Project Completion Report' on Chixoy comes to mentioning the murders is that of "delays" due to intensive insurgency activity in the project area, where "two resettlement officers were killed while performing their duties."