When I visited Belize last June I was supposed to be in an inflatable yellow kayak following the Macal River toward its source in the Maya mountains. But the rains had come early and with a vengeance, washing out the road into the river valley, and turning the knee-deep Macal into a dangerous torrent. So we drove north instead and from  Orange Walk – a town surrounded by citrus plantations – we took a fast boat to Lamanai.

Lamanai (a Spanish-Maya word for “submerged crocodile”) is the site of an ancient Maya city carved out of the lowland jungle thousands of years ago. To get there our boat snaked its way through mangrove swamp until the river widened into a freshwater lagoon, about 80 miles inland from the Caribbean. Keeping an eye out for the crocs, we stepped off
the wooden dock to a clearing in the forest where our guide – decked out in a yellow rain slicker – began his presentation, leading us through the downpour from one awesome stone pyramid to the next.

Once a city of more than 20,000 people, more than 700 buildings have been identified at the Lamanai site, most awaiting restoration. The largest are temples, places of ritual and sacrifice. Close your eyes and you can almost smell the incense, as the rain beats down like chanting Maya warriors dressed to kill in jaguar skins and brilliant feather headdresses.

Canadian author Ronald Wright wrote about visiting this corner of the Maya world in his book, Time Among the Maya. It was here in 1985 that he met David Pendergast, the man who led the Lamanai dig for the Royal Ontario Museum in the 1970s and 1980s. Pendergast first came to Belize in the 1950s, searching for clues to what Wright describes as “one of the great mysteries in New World history: the apparently spontaneous collapse of Classic Maya civilization when the Maya abandoned most of their cities in the lowlands of Guatemala, Belize, and [Mexico’s] southern Yucatan.”

Through years of painstaking work, Pendergast and his ROM crew uncovered evidence of more than three thousand years of continuous occupation by the Maya, the longest known span in Central America.

Carleton University students helped map the site, even nicknaming one plaza and group of administrative buildings as the “Ottawa group.” Oddly enough, despite Canada’s contributions to Lamanai, there is no Maya exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum, no trace of Pendergast’s life’s work or that of his longtime colleague and partner Elizabeth
Graham, a former ROM associate now directing the Lamanai project. “It’s sad,” says Pendergast, because “the Belize work remains the ROM’s lengthiest and largest research endeavour in its history.”

To make matters worse, an important link in Maya civilization further south of Lamanai is now threatened by a different kind of Canadian initiative.

Fortis, a TSE-listed power company based in Newfoundland, plans to build a US$30 million hydro dam in the heart of the Macal River Valley, one of the last undisturbed rainforest valleys remaining in Central America, inhabited by the Maya thousands of years ago.

Eligorio Sho, a Maya guide and naturalist, and his colleague Sharon Matola, director of the Belize Zoo and Tropical Education Centre, have been kayaking and bushwhacking through the nether regions of this valley for more than a decade, studying its abundant wildlife. They say this is no place for a hydro dam.

Maya guide and naturalist, Eligorio Sho, kayaking on the Macal River.

“The Quamwood trees along a Macal tributary are the only known nesting
sites for the scarlet macaw – a rare sub-species of parrot that has
been hunted to extinction in the rest of Central America,” says Matola.
“. . . To flood their habitat, when Fortis knows there are better alternatives, is nothing less than criminal.”

In an interview with the CBC last year, Fortis CEO Stanley Marshall admitted the dam would have “adverse environmental consequences,” but insisted “Chalillo will provide the absolute cheapest energy in Belize.”

Ambrose Tillet, a former Belize Electricity executive, says there’s nothing cheap about Chalillo. “I’ve gone through the fine print of this deal and it’s a ripoff. Fortis will make a killing while Belizeans pay exorbitant electricity rates, even when there’s not enough water to spin the turbines.”

A symbol of courage and strength to the ancient Maya, the jaguar may lose its home to a Canadian power company’s hydro dam.

A few years ago, while tracking scarlet macaw, Sho stumbled across the ruins of several Maya settlements in the proposed dam site area, long reclaimed by the jungle. After visiting the area with Sho, leading Maya archaeologist, Dr. Keith Prufer of Southern Illinois University, announced there was a strong likelihood of finding a substantial ruin somewhere in the upper Macal watershed. “The ruins that we saw had all the hallmarks of complex and important sites, including causeways, public plazas, large temple buildings, and what may be administrative architecture,” says Prufer. “If the area were not slated for the dam it would be feasible to mount a large  archaeological expedition to explore the region.”

Pendergast’s colleague Elizabeth Graham says it is “unthinkable” that such large-scale construction would be planned without first doing proper archaeological surveys, given that some of the richest and most complex Maya sites in the region are found nearby.

Fortis claims it will conduct these surveys during the dam’s 18-month construction period. But Sho wonders “what’s the point” if Fortis is going to flood the area anyway.

He hopes his ancestors have the last laugh. “Fortis’ consultants [Toronto-based AMEC] didn’t look carefully at the reservoir area: there are underground caves out there, where our people once buried their dead . . . so that reservoir might never hold water.”

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Grainne Ryder is Policy Director at Probe International, a Toronto-based foreign-aid  watchdog and environmental group.