On the Banks of the Chixoy
News: As Guatemala plans a massive new dam, a village of survivors risks losing everything---again.
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A CROOKED CANDLE CAST SPLOTCHES of light across the cement floor of Diego Perez Andres' two-room house. Newspaper pages with soccer players and swimsuit models dotted the cinder-block walls. The only furniture was a small table, two wooden stools, and the bed where I would spend the night: two worn slabs of wood covered with a thick purple and white woven blanket, no pillow. A thin sheet separated me from the space where my 33-year-old host, his wife, and their three young children would sleep.
A lean, nimble man with hunched shoulders and high cheekbones, Perez earns a little more than $100 a year selling cardamom. When he first arrived in this remote Guatemalan village 10 years ago, he couldn't have imagined living in a house this comfortable. He had spent nearly half his life in a refugee camp in Mexico, one of the million Guatemalans who had fled the vicious military campaign to purge the countryside of leftist guerrillas. Today, the Perez family is among 100 or so families of former refugees who have made their home in Copal AA (pronounced KO-pa-LA), a tiny town along the banks of central Guatemala's Chixoy River. But after a decade of calm, the people here are again at risk of losing everything. The danger this time is not men with guns, but the forces of progress, embodied in a dam that threatens to uproot them.
One afternoon in early April, Perez took me to a hill overlooking his quiet jungle home. Less than 30 miles from the Mexican border, Copal AA is not unlike countless other villages throughout Guatemala. Its 500 residents live in metal-roofed houses with small garden plots scattered along winding dirt paths. The nearest town with a marketplace, shops, and a pharmacy is about 15 miles up the Chixoy, a major tributary of the Usumacinta River—Central America's largest. Speaking Spanish with a faint accent of Mam, his native Mayan language, Perez told me the history of the village. In 1995, a collection of indigenous families who had returned from Mexico settled on the site of a former coffee plantation. Originally from a handful of provinces and speaking three different Mayan dialects, they named their new community Copal AA, a Spanish-Mayan hybrid that loosely translates as "cup of water." One town elder told me it simply means "surrounded by water."
Since Guatemala's 36-year civil war ended in 1996, Copal AA has been a peaceful, if not prosperous, place to live. Coffee remains the area's main cash crop; many families sell cardamom as well, using the extra income to buy luxuries like soap, sugar, and batteries. There's a small primary and secondary school, a health clinic, and a solar-powered radio transmitter in the center of town. Though the Guatemalan government has declared economic development a top priority, few benefits have yet to trickle down to Copal AA. It remains unelectrified; its drinking water comes from a nearby stream and is unsafe unless it's boiled for several minutes. During the eight-month rainy season, reaching the nearest hospital requires a four-hour hike followed by a bone-jarring, two-hour truck ride along unpaved tracks. For Clemente Velásquez López, the town's unofficial historian, development for Copal AA means getting the basics: "having a truly regional hospital, having access roads into our communities, having electricity." But appeals to the government for these essential services have been futile, he said. "What you see as Copal AA today hasn't come from government aid. It's come almost entirely from international help, solidarity from people who visit us."
IN FEBRUARY, one of the few literate men in Copal AA happened to pick up the newspaper Prensa Libre, where an article named specific towns likely to be affected by a series of government-approved hydroelectric dams. That's how the residents of the town surrounded by water learned that a dam was to be built on their lifeline, just a few miles upstream. "We weren't informed through other ways. Only through the Prensa," recalled Hugo Ramirez Caal, the spokesman and translator for the town council. Known as the Xalalá Project, the dam is one of eight private hydroelectric projects being promoted by the government. Standing between 860 and 950 feet tall, the dam would generate around 15 percent of the country's electricity. It was pure chance that Copal AA learned of these plans, Ramirez said. "Never did we see it in our own language."
It wasn't the first time the Guatemalan government had moved ahead with a massive hydroelectric project without notifying the people living in its vicinity. In 1975, a dam funded by the World Bank started to go up on the Chixoy, several miles downriver from the Xalalá site. Nearby communities didn't learn that they would have to move until two years after construction had begun. Following several years of negotiations and false promises, the government tried a new tactic to clear the area. The military was in the midst of waging a scorched-earth cam- paign across the countryside, destroying whatever—or whomever—presented an obstacle to finding the guerrillas. Between Feb- ruary and September 1982, the army carried out a series of massacres in the Chixoy basin, killing more than 400 people, including 35 children orphaned in the first series of attacks. The government then offered to pay those who volunteered to relocate less than $5 per acre.
Illustration: Todd Tankersley
