Manuel and Luís would like to forget what happened to their village of Río Negro in 1982. They are tired of the nightmares and headaches that accompany their memories.

"What happened to Río Negro in 1982 was so unjust," Luís says, "but we were not innocent. We had committed many crimes: the crime of being indigenous, the crime of being Catholic, and most importantly the crime of being united, of working together to fight that cursed dam."

The "cursed dam" was part of the Chixoy Hydroelectric Project, a massive dam, reservoir and power station built by the Guatemala state electricity company (INDE) with funding and technical support from the World Bank (WB) and Inter-American Development Bank. The village of Río Negro stood in the path of the project. The WB counseled Guatemala that the Chixoy project would bring the poor Central American nation cheap, sustainable power. Soon after Guatemalan authorities announced their plans to build this "development dream," the WB promised $72 million and the IDB $105 million, although adequate feasibility and social and environmental impact studies had not been conducted.

One example of the planning flaws that characterized the Chixoy project: neither INDE nor the WB consulted the people that lived along the river to be flooded by the Chixoy dam. Almost two years after project construction began, in 1977, INDE officials flew by helicopter into the small village of Río Negro to inform residents that they would need to abandon their homelands.

These Maya Achí people had maintained a rich cultural heritage along the fertile banks of the Río Chixoy for hundreds of years. "Life was hard, but it was good," one elder remembers. "People were content. Everyone lived nearby, we all knew each other, and we lived peacefully." Río Negro villagers were angered by the abrupt announcement that they would soon need to leave their land. "Many people did not want to leave and stood up for their rights," Luís remembers. He was a leader of a committee chosen by the community to negotiate with INDE.

INDE and the Río Negro committee reached an agreement on a resettlement package in 1980. However, when the people of Río Negro saw the rocky, marginal land that was supposed to sustain them in their new lives—the farm of Pacux—they refused to leave Río Negro unless they were provided with basic resources needed—fertile land and water—to rebuild their lives. Luís recalls how INDE responded, "They told us, ‘If you don’t leave, we’ll send the army to drive you out with bullets.’ And that’s what happened."

Violence first struck on March 4, 1980, when three INDE security officials arrived in the community to arrest several community members for stealing from a local store. "We told the soldiers to leave," one resident recalls. "They began shooting, killing seven of us, and then they attempted to flee. One escaped, the second we caught and later released and the third drowned in the river. For this, we were accused of murder."

In July 1980, two Río Negro committee members went to meet with INDE officials at the dam site. They were carrying the community’s only records of the resettlement and cash payment agreements that had been reached with INDE. Both men "disappeared." Their heavily tortured bodies were found a week later. The records were never recovered.

These acts of violence terrorized the people of Río Negro, and peaceful efforts at negotiation broke down. Stubbornly, they remained on their land, hoping that a miracle would allow them to stay. Project construction continued and, by the start of 1982, was nearing completion. The people of Río Negro were in the way, and that year they paid the price.

The first massacre suffered by Río Negro was on February 13, 1982. A local military commander ordered 74 men and women from Río Negro to report to the nearby village of Xococ for weapons training. Upon arrival, they were tortured, raped and murdered by the Xococ civil defense patrol, an involuntary civilian wing of the military employed to terrorize neighboring villages. Witnesses to the massacre recount that the soldiers told the 177 women and children before they were killed that they were being punished for being "guerrillas."

The WB backs this interpretation in several of its Chixoy documents, referring to "insurgency activity in the project area" as the cause of "resettlement problems." A survivor of the massacre responds, "How can innocent women and children, many of them pregnant, be mistaken for guerrillas? They couldn’t be. None of us were. We were peasants trying to make a living from the soil like our parents and our ancestors. I’ll tell you the real reason for the violence: they wanted our land for their cursed reservoir and dam, and we were in the way."

Terrified, survivors of the February and March massacres abandoned Río Negro and hid nearby. One group of 84 Río Negro refugees was discovered and killed by soldiers and patrollers at Los Encuentros, five miles from Río Negro, on May 14, 1982. Witnesses who worked at the nearby dam site in Pueblo Viejo assert that several hours prior to the massacre, soldiers stopped at the INDE office there, borrowed an INDE truck and drove to Los Encuentros to commit the massacre. After they had finished in Los Encuentros, the soldiers proceeded to Río Negro, burning the abandoned village to the ground.

Four months later, on September 13, civil defense patrollers and soldiers killed 92 people in Agua Fria, another village near the dam site. The soldiers forced the victims into a community house, barred the door and machine gunned the house. When all were killed, the house was burned to the ground. Thirty-five of those killed were orphaned children from Río Negro, whom the people of Agua Fria had taken into their homes. In total, 369 Río Negro villagers were murdered in 1982. Survivors fled, and their village was destroyed. No one remained "in the way." The Chixoy Reservoir began to be filled in late 1982, and what remained of Río Negro was soon underwater.

The WB was not only involved closely with INDE and the Chixoy Project prior to the violence, but granted an additional $44.6 million loan three years later, in 1985. The April 1996 publication of a Witness for Peace report on the Chixoy Project violence has prompted public questioning of the Bank’s role. WB President James Wolfensohn responded to these questions on June 18. In a letter to Witness for Peace and the International Rivers Network, Wolfensohn wrote that a preliminary investigation had found "no indication that Bank staff had any information...that Río Negro had been attacked in order to clear the way for the reservoir." One Bank official told Inter Press Service on condition of anonymity that the Bank did indeed know about the massacres as they were occurring, but claimed, "There was nothing we could do about it."

Survivors of the Río Negro massacres assert that their life has improved little today. Most of them live in Pacux, the farm that INDE purchased for them as compensation for the lands they lost in Río Negro. The rocky, bare soil in Pacux discourages planting, employment is limited and families struggle daily to earn enough cash to buy food.

The economic track record of the Chixoy Hydroelectric Project demonstrates the breadth of its failure. The project has never produced more than 70 percent of capacity. Cost overruns inflated the price tag from $270 million to $1.2 billion. And, because of a failure to conduct studies which would have predicted that the erosion of the Chixoy Basin’s badly denuded hillsides would result in reservoir siltation that will soon shut down the power turbines, recent estimates predict that the Chixoy will cease to produce electricity in 20 years. Such clear indicators have forced INDE and the WB to admit the project was a bad idea. In 1987, an INDE president described the Chixoy as "a financial disaster...which never should have been built." The WB in 1991 stated that the Chixoy "had proved to be an unwise and uneconomic investment" and Wolfensohn in his June 18 letter acknowledges that "this was a very weak project on technical and economic grounds."

Luís wants the WB to know about their continued suffering, and asks "that they find a solution, an immediate solution, because it happened over 10 years ago, and all that was promised hasn’t been fulfilled...We from Río Negro continue to suffer."

— Excerpted with permission from the Multinational Monitor, July/August 1996. The Multinational Monitor tracks corporate activity, especially in the Third World, focusing on the export of hazardous substances, worker health and safety, labor union issues and the environment. For more information on the Multinational Monitor, send e-mail to monitor@essential.org, or call (202) 387-8030. Click here to read the full article on the Chixoy Dam.