On the Banks of the Chixoy
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ON A HOT AFTERNOON this spring, hundreds of people blocked the intersection outside police headquarters in Guatemala City. The sidewalks were awash in reds, magentas, purples, and yellows as women and children in traditional Mayan dress sat on the curbs, eating tortillas, sipping Fanta, and listening to the speakers atop a truck parked in the middle of the street. Policemen with shields and batons waited close by. Nearly a month earlier, the Guatemalan Congress had ratified the Central American Free Trade Agreement, despite mass protests. Today, the demonstrators were asking legislators to reject the trade pact's domestic counterpart, a proposed law that would hasten the privatization of the country's remaining public services.
The privatization law, CAFTA, and foreign-funded projects like Xalalá are all part of an official campaign to attract foreign investment in hopes of boosting Guatemala's sagging economy. The politicians and business leaders supporting this effort believe they are doing the right thing, according to Tania Palencia Prado, a columnist for the newspaper Siglo Veintiuno, but they're following a route that's failed before. "It's an old idea that they are now modernizing," she explained. "They think progress is achieved by opening poor nations to products from the north. We've lived this way for more than 500 years." The current push for free trade and private investment is being carried out in the name of the rural poor, yet its intended beneficiaries are rarely told how such policies might affect them, she said. "That's the main problem," Palencia sighed, lighting a cigarette. "The principal abuse on the part of the government is not informing people."
Like CAFTA, the new dam is being pushed through with little regard for those it will ostensibly help. Sitting on the terrace outside his second-floor apartment in the capital, José Manuel Chacón described the ruinous impact it would have on villages like Copal AA. Chacón is a political cartoonist and a leader of Colectivo MadreSelva, the Mother Jungle Collective, an environmental group that has unearthed what little is known about Xalalá. A thick beard covered much of his face, but Chacón's eyes flashed urgently as he described how the proposed dam would flood more than 25 square miles— including at least nine villages—and dry up the river for another 15 towns or so downstream, including Copal AA. Because so little information about the dam has been released—not even the name of the company constructing it—no one knows exactly where its electricity will go. "What's certain is that it will be sold," Chacón said. What's also likely, he added, is that the power "won't go for the people who need it."
TWO MONTHS AFTER LEARNING about the dam, around 30 leaders from nearby villages gathered at Copal AA's town hall to discuss what to do next. Some had spent hours slashing their way through the jungle to get there. Though many couldn't read or write, all understood what a dam would mean for their daily lives: Villages upstream would be flooded and forced to relocate; those downstream would see their most reliable source of transportation and irrigation evaporate. Several weeks earlier, representatives from Copal AA and 20 neighboring villages had sent a letter to the Guatemalan Congress, demanding more information about the project. Even now, they have received no acknowledgment of their concerns. Anger about the snub hung thick in the humid air. But there was also a quiet acceptance of the fight likely to come—a fight not for electricity or better roads, but simply to defend what little they had.
An elder leaned into the circle and clicked away in Q'eqchi'. "During the war, indigenous communities were most affected by the conflict and now, with these dams, it's the indigenous areas that are going to be most affected again," he said. "They no longer come to kill us with bullets. It's no longer with war that they want to kill indigenous people. Now it's with grand economic plans that they want to finish us off."
Illustration: Todd Tankersley
