A crowd estimated to number nearly 3,500 called on the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank to take responsibility for their roles in the building of the Chixoy Dam in central Guatemala two decades ago. Protestors angrily drew attention to what they said was a massacre in 1983 by the Guatemalan army of about 400 hundred people – mostly indigenous women and children – who refused to abandon their homes to make way for the hydroelectric dam. “The World Bank, the IDB and the government should take responsibility for their actions,” said Carlos Chen Osorio, a spokesman for the affected communities who said his wife and children were killed in the massacre. “We want our lives restored and to live with dignity,” he said. About 3,500 residents were
forcibly evicted without adequate compensation when the dam was built in the 1970s and 1980s, the protestors said in presenting the results of a two-year study on the dam’s legacy. The study was coordinated by Barbara Rose Johnston, a US anthropologist at the Center for Political Ecology in Santa Cruz, California. “The legacy of Chixoy includes
extreme poverty and immense suffering caused by inept development, corruption and violence,” Johnston said. The study outlines “a blueprint for the future, a future that promises reconciliation and propels the communities and Guatemala towards the restoration of a healthy and dignified way of life”, she said. The document recommends
unspecified reparations from the Guatemalan government, restoration of lost land, the supply of drinking water and electricity and economic development plans. The protestors called on the World Bank and IDB to join negotiations already launched by Guatemalan government to assess damages caused by the dam. They accused the World Bank of failing to ensure proper relocation and compensation for affected communities when
it extended loans for the dam project in 1978 and 1985. The international lender in recent years has turned away from funding large infrastructure projects in favour of smaller, community-based schemes to alleviate poverty in the developing world.