Taking a dive: Each year, 180,000 tourists come to Belize, known for some of the best scuba diving in the world. Credit: Melanie Stetson Freeman.

San Ignacio, Belize: By noon on most weekend days,
the Macal River is choked with hundreds, even thousands of bathers,
waders, and swimmers seeking respite from the sweltering streets of
this jungle town high in the interior of Belize. Children play in the
shallows, teenagers swim back and forth across the gentle current,
while their parents and grandparents cool themselves, conversing with
friends and neighbors.

The Macal has always been central to life here, providing drinking
water, food, and the primary means of commerce – initially to transport
goods, now as a main attraction for the nature-loving tourists on which
the local economy depends. But today the river is also at the center of
a roiling, four-year battle over the construction of a new dam in one
of Central America’s last undisturbed forests.

Environmentalists and local residents say the dam will harm the
surrounding environment. The Canadian company building it says it will
have minimal ecological impact while making the country more
self-sufficient. The project highlights the dilemma faced by many poor
nations, especially those whose economies rely primarily on ecotourism:
how to bring economic development while maintaining the reason that
travelers – and their tourist dollars – go there.

Twenty-five miles upstream from here, Fortis Inc. is building the
$30 million Chalillo dam, a project proponents say will bring cheaper,
cleaner power to a country struggling to keep up with growing
electricity demand. While large dams have fallen out of favor in the US
and elsewhere, Central America – a region with many rivers and little
fossil fuel – is embracing them. Dozens of dams are proposed or under
construction in the region, from the uplands of Panama and Costa Rica
to the Usumacinta River valley on the Mexico-Guatemala border, where a
proposed series of dams threaten to inundate major Mayan ruins.

“This is a bad project all the way around,” says Gr√°inne Ryder, policy director of Toronto’s Probe International,
a watchdog group opposed to the Chalillo dam. “Fortis may make a quick
profit out of it, but Belizeans will be left with the real costs for
generations.”

Not so, says Fortis. “It is our opinion that the Chalillo project
and hydroelectric production is the most cost-efficient and
environmentally responsible energy supply option for Belize,” counters
spokeswoman Donna Hynes, noting that Belizean electricity demand has
been growing at 8 to 10 percent a year. “Belize already experiences
brownouts in their supplies [imported] from Mexico.”

Belize, a former British colony of 256,000 people, is one of the
premier destinations for nature tourism in the Western Hemisphere. Each
year, 180,000 travelers visit the country to explore its coral reefs
and Mayan temples, or to hike and canoe through backcountry wilderness.
Their spending accounts for about a fifth of Belize’s $1.3 billion
economy and directly employs a quarter of its workforce.

Residents of San Ignacio and the surrounding Cayo district say most
people here are against the dam, and T-shirts and banners bearing such
slogans as “The Macal is ours” are hot items. The San Ignacio town
council opposes the project, and the vice mayor testified against it
during an unsuccessful attempt to block construction.

“As soon as you talk about holding back 160 million cubic yards of
water in a forested area you can be sure there’s going to be
putrification [in the reservoir] and that mercury levels will go up and
water quality will go down,” says Mick Fleming, co-owner of the Chaa
Creek Lodge, an upscale ecotourism resort that employs 100 people15
miles downriver from the dam. He and other residents say that water
quality declined after the construction of the smaller Mollejon dam a
decade ago, a facility that is now also owned by Fortis.

The river, Mr. Fleming argues, is worth more to Belize in its wild
state then the electricity Chalillo will deliver, a position several
environmental groups have taken as well. The Belize Zoo and others
oppose the project, in part because it will flood the only known
breeding area in Belize of the endangered scarlet macaw. The area is
also home to jaguars, spider monkeys, and a number of uninvestigated
Mayan sites.

But those involved in Chalillo say the project is getting a bad rap.
“There is no energy-development project that you can undertake that
will not have environmental impacts,” says Dawn Sampson of Belize
Electricity Ltd., a Fortis subsidiary that has a monopoly on power
distribution in Belize. “The challenge is to ensure the benefits
outweigh the negative impacts.”

Fortis says the dam would boost annual domestic production by about
25 percent, and will help control floods, reduce greenhouse-gas
emissions, and, greatly increase the efficiency of an existing dam
downstream by storing water for use during the valley’s frequent dry
spells.

The area where the dam sits is near an active fault and still
experiences tremors. But, says Fortis’s chief engineer John Evans,
“This structure was designed with the same criteria as if it were being
built in southern California.”

Critics say other solutions to meet peak power demand – generators
driven by wind, natural gas, or stalk refuse from the sugar industry –
have never been adequately explored.

The root problem, says Ms. Ryder, is a lack of transparency in the
decision to build Chalillo. “If there had been an open and competitive
bidding process, it would have given the government and consumers the
chance to weigh the costs and benefits of each option,” she says.
“Instead you had a dam-building company come forward and say that there
were no other options except to build a dam.”

Probe International and other groups are trying to get investors to
boycott Fortis, but barring a shareholder revolt, the project looks
likely to be completed by the end of 2005.

Patrick McCully, a dam expert at the International Rivers Network,
hopes that other countries in the region will weigh all options before
rushing ahead with foreign-sponsored dams. “Not every hydro project is
wrong, but a lot of unnecessary and poorly performing projects get
built because of a lack of transparency,” he says

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