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On July 7, 2006, Spanish National Court
Judge Santiago Pedraz issued an international arrest order for
two former Guatemalan military dictators, Efrain Rios Montt and
Oscar Humberto Mejia Victores, along with five others accused
of genocide and other crimes against humanity during Guatemala's
civil war. His action follows an aborted effort to depose Rios
Montt and others in Guatemala the previous week, and signals
Spanish intent to proceed with the case filed by Guatemalan Nobel
Prize laureate Rigoberta Menchú, whose father and 38 other
people were killed during a government siege on the Spanish Embassy
in Guatemala City in 1980. The warrant cites an array of actions
and events including the Río Negro massacre, orders a
freeze upon the financial assets of the accused, and has been
lodged with Interpol and Europol making the warrants and financial
freeze of assets effective throughout the world. Amazingly,
this news of a renewed effort to prosecute parties responsible
for genocide in Guatemala received scant mention in the Washington
Post and no mention in the New York Times.
The lack of interest in reporting
the news that a Spanish court had issued warrants for the arrest
of three former Guatemalan heads of state who are charged with
genocide is perhaps explained by the long historical friendship
between the accused and the United States, as well as the fact
that Guatemala is a very busy place these days. President Berger
has passed a decree to implement CAFTA and signaled strong support
for Plan Puebla-Panama a massive effort to develop and
connect the resources, labor and products of Central America
to its' northern neighbors. Construction has begun on an electrical
grid to connect Guatemala to the Mexico and the United States.
Expansion in the mining sector suggests the promise of fortunes
to be made in Guatemalan gold, nickel, copper, and uranium by
Canadian operators and their investors. The World Bank, Inter-American
Development Bank and other international financial institutions
are underwriting transportation and energy development to move
the country and its supply of natural gas, minerals, and other
resources further into the global market.
Business is good and Guatemala's
international star appears to be rising. Guatemala has been elected
to a seat on the UN's new Human Rights Commission. The United
States is lobbying for Guatemala as candidate for the Latin America
seat of the UN Security Council. Mexico's Foreign Minister Luis
Ernesto Derbez has announced his support for Guatemala over the
other candidate, Venezuela. Yet, while business is good, true,
meaningful security remains elusive.
Much of the economic expansion
is occurring in the Mayan countryside where villagers struggle
to patch together a life after surviving decades of violence
and the related loss of land and livelihood. Over a million
Guatemalans were displaced during the nation's internal conflict,
and over 200,000 people killed in a campaign of state-sponsored
violence against a largely Mayan population. In 1999, the United
Nations-sponsored Commission on Historical Clarification (CEH)
reported the findings from exhumations, forensic analysis, and
witness testimony: some 83% of the 42,275 named victims were
Mayan civilians, 93% of the atrocities committed during the conflict
had been the work of the armed forces, and, as evidenced by a
number of exemplary cases, massacres were the result of a policy
of state-sponsored violence on a Mayan civilian population. The
Government of Guatemala and its military dictators were responsible
for genocide and other crimes against humanity.
One of the Mayan massacres
investigated by the CEH is the case of Río Negro, a village
that now lies under the reservoir created by the Chixoy Dam.
Built in the late 1970s and early 1980s with Inter-American Development
Bank and World Bank financing, designs were approved, the project
financed, and construction begun in 1975 without notifying the
local population. As demonstrated in a 2005 Chixoy Dam Legacy
Issues study, construction began without legal acquisition of
the land supporting the construction works, the dam, the hydroelectric
generation facility, the reservoir, or the farms needed to support
resettled communities. Construction proceeded without a comprehensive
census of affected peoples or a plan to address compensation,
resettlement and alternative livelihoods for some 3,445 mostly
Mayan residents displaced by the dam and its reservoir, nor,
any effort to assess damages or provide compensatory measures
for the 6,000 households in surrounding communities. Civilian
protest occurred when negotiations with authorities failed and
petitions were submitted to the Guatemalan Government and the
Spanish Embassy. These complaints were interpreted by the military
Government as evidence of insurgent influence and the Army declared
these "resistant communities" subversive. When construction
was complete and the reservoir waters rose in January 1983, ten
communities in the Chixoy River Basin had been destroyed by massacre.
In Río Negro alone, some 444 of the 791 original inhabitants
had been killed.
The Chixoy Dam was built at
the cost of land, lives, and livelihood in violation of national
and international laws. People were forcibly "resettled"
at gunpoint and with massacre. International financing allowed
a steady flow of funds into the coffers of a military dictatorship,
in violation of loan contracts that specifically prohibited the
release of funds unless legal title to project areas had been
secured. To this day much of the land that supports the dam,
hydroelectric generation facility, and the reservoir is titled
to private citizens and Mayan communities.
Despite this dismal human rights
record, the Chixoy hydroelectric project has also produced considerable
profit. The hydroelectric energy generated at the Chixoy Dam
has been the primary source of power for Guatemala for two decades.
This Cold War project was financed by the Inter-American Development
Bank, the World Bank and others at a time when the United States
was keen to support those who fought communism, but unable to
provide military aid to Guatemala because of its human rights
record. And, when the public-owned electrical utility was privatized,
financiers experienced significant profit when their loans were
paid in full. Thus, the Inter-American Development Bank enjoyed
revalued interest income of more than $139 million from their
Chixoy Project investment.
Meanwhile, Rio Negro massacre
survivors struggle in the poverty of a "resettlement"
village the first of some 24 strategic hamlets built to
contain and reeducate the civilian population during the civil
war. Communities adjacent to the reservoir, upstream, and downstream
from the dam have not received any compensation or remediation
for damages resulting from the loss of land and other property,
loss of access to lands and markets, or loss of property and
life as a result of construction failures and flashfloods resulting
from the operation of the floodgates. And, there are no viable
rights-protected mechanisms to allow affected people to complain
or negotiate assistance.
So, why is this history and
the misery of its consequences relevant? While Peace Accords
signed in 1996 promised reparations that included investigations
and legal actions to insure never again, these promises have
yet to be fully realized. No high level military officer has
been tried. Reported rates of forced evictions, rape, threats
of violence and assassinations, and murders continue to rise.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour concluded
in her recent visit to Guatemala that the Peace Accords have
failed. The many failures to prosecute perpetrators suggest that
violence with impunity is still the order of the land in Guatemala.
And, CAFTA, with its' comprehensive development agenda, will
most certainly introduce new tensions into an already ulcerating
countryside.
In promoting Guatemala as the
reasonable candidate for the UN Security Council seat, the United
States is apparently supporting age-old friends for age-old reasons.
Will it be business as usual, with dams, roads, mining and other
enterprising industry imposed on a resistant civilian population?
Will the US profit by banking on violence to "secure"
its economic interests and halt the spread of Venezuelan-style
liberalism in the region?
Happily, other nations are
working to reinvigorate the stalled reparations process in Guatemala.
In the months to come prosecutors for the Spanish case will sift
through the massive amount of evidence to compile the case of
genocide and other crimes against humanity against Ríos
Montt, Oscar Humberto Mejía Victores, Ángel Aníbal
Guevara Rodriguez, Donaldo Álvarez Ruiz, German Chupina
Barahona, Pedro García Arredondo, Benedicto Lucas García,
and Romeo Lucas García, the former Guatemalan President
who died in May 2006. Evidence includes the forensic data from
the exhumation of hundreds of massacre sites, oral testimony
from massacre survivors and other eye-witnesses and material
participants, declassified documents from the United States Central
Intelligence Agency as well as the files and records of the Guatemalan
National Police, which contain photographs, assassination orders,
and detailed reports on numerous episodes of violence. For the
hundreds and thousands of massacre survivors who seek reparations,
and for a nation who seeks to regain its dignity and place in
the world, the true price of security is an honest reconciliation
with the past.
Barbara Rose Johnston is an anthropologist and senior research
fellow at the Center for Political Ecology. She is the primary
author of the Chixoy Dam Legacy Issues Study (2005), a five-volume
study that is the product of independent investigation accepted
by the Guatemalan Government and distributed by the American
Association for the Advancement of Science, Science and Human
Rights Program. Copies of the study are available in Spanish
and English at http://www.centerforpoliticalecology.or/chixoy.html
and http://shr.aaas.org/guatemala/chixoy/chixoy.html.
She can be reached at: bjohnston@igc.org
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