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."